


Come Dancing All Afire

by fauxbernice



Category: RuPaul's Drag Race RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Angst, Best Friends, F/F, Female trixie, female katya, they're both bisexual, with a lot of confusing feelings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-21
Updated: 2019-06-24
Packaged: 2019-11-01 15:51:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 23,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17870180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fauxbernice/pseuds/fauxbernice
Summary: Let every lover who loves the LordCome to the dance singing of Love,Let her come dancing all afireDesiring only him who created herand separated her from the dangerous worldly stateorIt is New York City in 1999, and this is the story of Trixie and Katya's friendship told in six parts.





	1. Chapter 1

In the reading room of the New York Public Library, Trixie Mattel reads about Saint Catherine of Bologna, the patron saint against temptation. Trixie’s face was so close to the page, she could smell the paper. Saint Catherine is not just about temptation, she’s the patroness of artists, just what Trixie needs. She thinks they could be sisters, five hundred years apart. Trixie is an artist, and she _embodies_ temptation.

Wisps of smoke from centuries of candles, she reads, have stained Saint Catherine’s hands and face mahogany. In the photo, the saint wears a gargantuan habit, her nut-colored fingers laced in her lap. Trixie wears a halter top and holds a dry clay egg in one hand and a silver teaspoon in the other.

In her mind, Trixie lifts the musty black fabric. She looks up Saint Catherine’s legs. She sees this: not an old lady’s crinkles but the lucent flesh of a sixteen-year-old virgin. One morning, Cath walked out on her rich foster family, with its tutors and grooms, and offered herself to the nuns.

In the cloister, Cath will never listen at night for the marquis padding toward her through chilled marble halls.

Why Cath endured that setup is all because her own father sent her there, to serve the marquis’s daughter. There’s always a man right? So there’s always a problem in the house.

It is October 1999, and the problem in Trixie’s house is Dennis, who tucks her in. Dennis is the best friend of her father, Charlie. She remembers this: hugging her knees on the stairs one night, listening to the adults in the Greenwich Village townhouse where she was born and where Dennis has lived forever. Her mother, Diana, came and went from both bedrooms without embarrassment, so Trixie grew up thinking all married women had sleepovers. Downstairs that evening, her father said, “Dennis and I share everything.” Then a pause, and Charlie’s voice again, lower, a tone she understood even before kindergarten: “Except for the Steinway, my friend, everything,” and then rising laughter.

No one wrote anything about Cath’s mother in the book. No one talks about Diana Mattel either, even when Trixie asks.

In the library, she reads how Cath and the marquis’s daughter grew up studying at the same table. When Cath walked behind her mistress in the gardens, their silk gowns swished like running water. That’s because Cath was given the daughter’s lavish hand-me-downs with barely yellowed armpits. Trixie can see it.

Plus Cath got unlimited paper and inks, being good at painting animals and the faces of saints.

With precise little bursts, she rips out the page on Saint Cath. The woman across from her, tracing a map onto onionskin, yelps.

“Oh, relax,” says Trixie. She packs up her egg and her spoon and the folded page and strides down the staircase and out into the autumn rain.

 

Trixie is sixteen, just a girl trying to get from the entry hall of the townhouse to her pink room on the third floor when her father, Charlie, thumps the sofa in that _sit down, baby_ way.

She stops, rain-soaked, in the foyer. The place is too quiet. Not an acolyte in sight. Did he send them upstairs to their own rooms or out for pizza? Usually the first floor is packed with young musicians. Some are students, some strays, but Charlie Mattel only brings home the best. Three days ago he found two brilliant cellist chicks- _found,_ thinks Trixie, like shining orphans. The girls have been ensconced in his bedroom. Like he’s really going to jam with cellos. Half the acolytes are guys, who supply part-time money and part-time girlfriends and revere Charlie in an appropriately oblique manner. When someone new shows up, they say things like, “What’s your ax, baby?” But half are girls who play celestial music and give celestial blowjobs and can’t believe they get to jam and party and live in the extra bedroom of, oh my God, _Charlie Mattel_.

Trixie hasn’t heard the place this silent in centuries.

Charlie’s at one end of the parlor sofa, clamping a beer between socked feet and a clarinet between his knees. He’s adjusting the reed. “C’mere, baby,” he says. “Isn’t it amazing? We’re alone.”

On West Tenth Street, _alone_ means three people: Trixie, her father, and Dennis, who lounges on the far sofa arm refractive as a patch of snow, from his long, milk-colored hair to his alabaster hands. His jeans are white, too, and he parks a damp white Ked on the upholstery. Dennis Graves is not and never has been an acolyte. He is a horn player and the best musical technician in the house- even Charlie says it. But Charlie has the charisma. Dennis claims to be albino, but this eyes are green. He pretends to be unaware of Trixie by keeping his head down. He pretends he is not getting sidewalk crud on the brocade He pretends to edit penciled notes in a spiral-bound score.

He turned thirty-nine last month.

Trixie shifts in the foyer. “What?”

She has a stolen saint in her backpack. Her egg is stolen, too; it is supposed to live on the Studio Art windowsill at school. She holds up her arms to show the damage she will do to the upholstery. “I’m soaking wet.”

She regrets this instantly. Dennis’s attention, like a draft from a threshold, wafts towards her. He doesn't even have to raise is head. Charles blows on the clarinet mouthpiece, looks puzzled, and says, “Sounds like fish frying.” Not much about her father’s jazz makes sense to Trixie.

“Get your shoes off Mimi’s sofa,” she says. Mimi is Charlie’s mother. She owns the house, but she lives in an old folks’ home uptown. Some days Trixie can talk to Dennis any way she wants.

Dennis smiles. The Ked remains. “Trixie,” he says softly. Even his voice sounds albino. Trixie thinks of white plaster walls, licked by the painter’s brush.

“I sent the acolytes out to collect sounds,” says Charlie, as if sounds were lost quarters that winked from gutters. “Sit, Daughter.”

She drops her backpack, collaborates noisily with a folding chair in the parlor, and sits on it backward while Charlie watches with pleased amusement. She smells his body oil: sandalwood.

“That school psychologist called again today,” he says. “But I think she’s on the wrong track. What do you think?”

Trixie flinches and looks to the ceiling cherubs for strength. The ceiling cherubs are three plaster angels who cavort around a trio of bare bulbs. Their ax used to be the chandelier, but last month someone from Craigslist took it away. The house is shedding its sweetest parts like lost earrings; in return, electricity keeps humming, pizzas keep arriving, and Trixie keeps going to Pleasant Grove.

“Are we getting a new chandelier?”

“Do you know _why_ the school psychologist called again?”

“No.” Trixie stares off into the kitchen, willing the refrigerator to disgorge a glass of milk.

“I think you do.”

“She’s full of shit. Can I go now?”

“Look at me, Daughter.” He smiles as if indulging her. “It’s important to be candid about these things.”

Dennis’s not-looking at her is no so intense he might as well shine flashlights in her eyes.

Charlie, and the smile, persist. “So tell us why the school psychologist is talking about you _engaging_ with the male teachers.”

The school psychologist always peels and eats an orange while she and Trixie talk. The scent comes back to Trixie in a rush. It is the scent of denial, the innocence that slides over her when Susannah, the psychologist, asks how she feels about her mother, her father, the torments she dreams up for that Rodriguez girl.

Extricating herself gracefully from a straddled folding chair could be problematic.

“Screw you.” She knocks over the metal chair as she stands and elbows one of the new cellos, so she barely has to hear her father say under the clatter, _Oh, you can do better than your old dad_.

 

Sometimes Trixie has to share her room- a ginger operation, a kind of Charlie trick.

It is one year after the summer of Jean-Luc Ponty, when her father and Dennis take her one night to hear Ponty play in Central Park, and Dennis steered her under some trees. She was still fifteen. “You radiate power and light,” Dennis told her on the grass. But he is always saying shit like that. It was the only time he lost control, and they still didn’t go all the way.

It is four p.m. on a Friday, and Trixie takes a bite of Dennis’s grilled cheese. He has been making grilled cheese the way she likes it- and rice pudding and chocolate egg creams- for as long as she remembers.

Charlie smiles her up and down. “Sweetheart, your room-”

“Katya is sleeping over Friday and Saturday in _my room_.”

Katya is Trixie’s best friend. They smoke pot on the roof and take turns reading Charlie’s pornography aloud to each other. Trixie is positive her mother, whose cool elegance she remembers as seeming somehow beyond sex, never read these books.

“Then Sunday,” says Charlie. “My brilliant young cellists are in need of your floor. Just for a few days. Open your heart.”

She has seen the new cellists, always together- giggling on the stairs or leaving Charlie’s room. They could be sisters, their faces like two porcelain cups, but one girl is shaped like a cello and one more like a bow.

“My heart?” says Trixie. “My heart is a cell in which candles burn at the feet of Saint Catherine of Bologna.” Language is the only turf on which she can stand with her father and joust. Occasionally it works.

“Well then I pity you,” says Charlie.

“When the fuck do I get my privacy back?” says Trixie. “Where am I supposed to do my homework?”

What she really wants to know is where is the place beneath a girl’s armpit that the back ends and the _side_ begins? She can share her pink room with strangers, but tell her this: Is there a region between back and breast that can, in a proper back rub, be considered neutral?

“Be creative,” says Charlie.

What if it doesn’t _feel_ neutral?

“Be creative and be adaptable.”

Dennis says nothing. His language with Trixie is often nonverbal. For example, the way he has been tucking her in the past couple of years: sitting on the edge of her bed without moving and sometimes stroking her long hair, as if he were the father and she were the little girl. The hair stroking makes her feel so porous and ashamed that she pretends to be asleep. She has no idea if Charlie knows; he sleeps on the second floor, and Dennis and Trixie share the third. What would Charlie even say? _He strokes your hair- and?_ She wonders if Diana knew before she left last year. Dennis never says it is a secret, yet she senses that their silence is also required. She has not told anyone but Katya. Often she wishes she had not.

Trixie would like to ask Katya a few things when she comes over, though she won’t. For example: Do Katya’s body parts meet clearly at dotted lines, like pink and green states on a gas-station map? Where does she get her God-given ability to not give a fuck?

 

And what can Trixie draw from Cath’s first miracle, performed after death and underground? The nun’s corpse exuded a scent so sweet and strong it rose through the soil and drew all of Bologna to her grave. Trixie can see it: every morning, men and women gather at the mound of earth, inhale deeply, and drop to their knees. All day the perfume clings to them. The grave smells like tea-rose oil.

No, the priest says, what you smell is Easter lily, the flower of Christ- but he is wrong. It’s tea rose, the scent of power and coiled-up sex, an oily perfume in a little brown bottle. It’s the perfume mothers leave behind when they split, that daughters rub between their toes to someday drive men wild. And after eighteen days, according to the book, the mourners get kind of manic. They love and desire their dead, sweet-smelling virgins even more than they hate and desire whores. They have to _see_. So they dig her up. The women and girls dig very carefully, scraping with silver spoons.

 

Late October sunlight slants through shuddering leaves, angling low into the windows. Trixie does her homework sprawled on her pink carpet- when she does it. More often she goes to the museum after school, pulling out a sketchpad, dropping her backpack with its straps and buckles noisily on the floor.

People look up. People always look up. She radiates power and light.

“Have you seen her notebooks?” Charlie demands when he is summoned to the school. Trixie looks at him gratefully. They sit across a conference table from two teachers and the principal. It’s a cool school. Everyone wears jeans except the janitor. Even the principal wears jeans. Charlie calls him Dave. When he calls the science teacher Honor he gives her a long, private smile, as if a waiter were even now carrying in a silver tray set for two. “Her real notebooks, Dave, the ones she draws in. Do you people not know an artist when you see one?”

“Even artists go to college,” Says the English teacher, Zack Weiss, softly.

“By definition, the artist lives _outside of society,_ ” says Charlie, “and mirrors to itself, whether he goes to college or not. I’m an adjunct, personally, and this is what I teach. Are you noticing any lack of intelligence in my daughter? You’re not? Then- ladies and gentlemen- are we really here to discuss a few missed pages or homework for a girl who spends every afternoon in a museum?”

“She could go to an art school,” says Dave. There’s RISD. There’s Cooper Union if she can get in. But she needs the grades.”

“What are you grading?” Charlie says. “I think you should ask yourselves this,” he says. “Why does your art teacher ask a girl who can’t stay out of the Met to rub an egg with a spoon?”

 

Friday night Trixie and Katya decide to get high. No occasion- just that Charlie and Dennis are playing the Vanguard, with most of the acolytes in tow; just that two months into school Trixie is bored sick. The government is based on a tripartite system, and she’s supposed to care about this why, exactly? She’s in love with Studio Art; it’s got Rapidograph pens, and Trixie can draw anything- Ophelia drowning, Icarus falling, Janis Joplin lusciously dead form smack, with that fabulous throat- but Mr. Ramirez assigned some weird shit. They had to form eggs out of raw clay, let them dry for two weeks, and then polish them in an endless, circular motion with the backs of teaspoons.

School did not provide the teaspoons. Trixie took one of Mimi’s spoons, an English antique sterling spoon that shows a leaping hart. She knows the difference between a leaping hart, which she draws surrounded by William Morris- like leaves, and a leaping heart- which she draws interpretively. Sometimes she draws it so interpretively she has to tear the picture out of her notebook and rip it into little strips and throw them out in different trash cans on her way to school.

The egg polishing goes on for two more weeks, consuming entire art periods. Trixie steals her egg from the windowsill and burnishes during French, world religions, and math.

“What’s the fucking point?” says Katya. They are baking their dinner: zucchini muffins. They can’t decide if it’s better to distribute the whole nickel bag through the batter or roll a couple of joints first.

“My egg is perfect,” says Trixie. “It looks like pewter.”

Aqua threads trail from Mimi’s ancient copy of _The Joy of Cooking_ as if it has a secret underwater life. Trixie checks the recipe, then pours a dollop of vanilla into the bowl without measuring.

“Now, see, if he told me to rub an egg on a spoon,” says Katya, in that husky voice Trixie never tires of. “I’d stick the spoon down his throat.”

Trixie readies herself. She always has to mention the one thing that hurts; it’s like nudging a loose tooth. “Your grandmother said you could sleep here both nights, right?”

Katya winces. It’s a faint movement around the eyes. “Probably.” The grandmother is a sensitive subject. Katya turns her back and reaches for a bag of sugar. Her top rides up, revealing an indented waist that Trixie appreciates because it is necessary that they both be sexy, but revealing.

Katya licks a finger and dips it in the bag of sugar. “You think Dennis might come into our room?”  
Trixie brains an egg on the edge of the bowl. She thinks about a redhead oboist she likes to look at across the parlor till he blushes. She demanded his name once, and he stammered it: Flynn. Charlie likes to say he has the only jazz oboist in New York. Trixie is not allowed to bother the acolytes, but she can stare.

Dennis has never come in on sleepovers before- she assumes because she stays up and talks.

“He just checks on me,” she says in a low voice. “He never _does_ anything.”

When Katya laughs it sounds like _huh_. Trixie suddenly feels grateful to have confessed the hair stroking, grateful that Katya doesn’t judge. Maybe Katya intuits the back rubs, which only just started. Katya, caught beneath an overhead light that brings out the cinnamon in her hair, has her moments of beauty and perfect understanding.

“If he comes in,” says Katya, “can we be mean to him?”

“He lives here,” says Trixie, who only knows certain ways of being mean to Dennis.

“You know the kind of mean I mean.” Katya orbits her upper teeth with her tongue as if checking the jewels on a bracelet. They have both perfected the Pearl Drops move.

The words _drawing off_ come faintly to mind- a lightning rod drawing off the fatal bolt; a sister drawing off a bully. A saint, intervening. Is it cool if the person _drawing off_ does not know what she is getting into?

“Shoot a bullet in his heart for all I care.”

“Woah,” says Katya. “Fond of the motherfucker are we?”

 

The first time Katya came over, they sat on the carpet of Trixie’s pink room, which Trixie thinks of as girlfriend pink, a pink chosen by one of Charlie’s ex-lovers to coax Trixie out of  a black phase. Kids and acolytes are forever telling Trixie what the pink is like; it is Barbie, it is Pepto-Bismol, it is Bazooka bubble gum. But the first time Katya saw it she said, _Oh my God you live in a vagina_ , and Trixie said, _Fuck you, Katya_ , and the wary warmth of equals was sealed between them.

It is an hour and a half after Trixie and Katya made the muffins. They were laying on Trixie’s bed, in just their bras.

“Is this gay?” Katya asks, tracing a circle around Trixie’s belly button. “Because I’m not gay.”

Katya and Trixie often kiss in their underwear, and Katya always reminds Trixie that she’s not gay. Trixie doesn’t even mind.

“It’s not gay,” says Trixie, sitting up. Katya follows suit, facing her.  

“Good.” Katya leans into Trixie’s mouth, they both taste like cinnamon and natural leaves.  Katya’s mouth lowers to Trixie’s neck, and Trixie’s hands instinctively grab Katya’s waist. Katya begins working her tongue over Trixie’s neck.

Katya is softer when she is like this. Trixie always loves her, but is different when her mouth is on her neck.

“Trix, touch me,” says Katya, and Trixie moves her hands lower, reaching into Katya’s underwear.

In school, they do the Pearl Drops thing to get men’s attention, but there’s usually more to what they’re doing. Neither of them really _want_ a man’s attention, they want each other, shirtless in Trixie’s pink room. 

Trixie feels Katya ease into her as her fingers dance around Katya’s opening. Katya’s mouth doesn’t move from Trixie’s neck, but she can feel her growing distracted by Trixie’s fingers.

Trixie slips her index finger into Katya, then her middle, and begins moving them in and out. Katya moans into Trixie’s neck.

“Lay down,” Trixie says, gently pushing her torso with her free hand, Katya obliges, closing her eyes and letting Trixie’s fingers work her. Trixie has never really played an instrument, not like her father, but she knows what a hand can do.

“Kiss me,” says Katya, her eyes are still shut. Katya is the one who craves Trixie, the one who asks to be kissed, asked to be touched. Trixie leans into Katya. Katya bites Trixie’s lower lip harder with each thrust of Trixie’s hand.

As Trixie moves her fingers in and out, Katya arches her back. Trixie’s thumb grazes over Katya’s clit, and her teeth clench on Trixie’s lower lip. Trixie likes Katya like this, likes when she wants her, when she’s letting out soft moans into her mouth.

Trixie moves faster, and Katya’s back arches more, if even possible. Katya’s insides tighten around Trixie’s fingers, and Trixie removes her mouth from Katya’s, bringing it slowly down her chest. Katya’s skin was smooth, and Trixie could feel the goosebumps raising on her stomach.

Katya is about to finish, and Trixie knows this. She keeps her thumb on he clit, working faster circles as Katya squirms.

Katya lets out a moan, as Trixie’s fingers release. Katya’s eyes finally open, as she tries to get her breath to steady. “We could shoot him in the heart for real, you know,” Katya says, abruptly sitting up. “Dennis, I mean. We could.”

“Yeah, maybe,” says Trixie. She is unphased by the change of the subject, the rejection of Katya to actually acknowledge anything that is happening. Trixie can kiss her anytime she wants, and Katya will kiss back, but there comes a point where it becomes too much for her. It's not gay, but it could be. But Katya is thinking about a gun and Trixie knows where Charlie keeps his gun, knows how to load it, thinks she could even turn the safety off, if she so pleased.

“If you want, we could.”

Trixie stays silent. Katya gets up and puts a T-shirt on. She rolls out her sleeping bag on the floor. Trixie rises and puts her own pajamas on.

Trixie sometimes grows tired of the games Katya plays. She asks to be kissed, but would never admit it. She confesses her love to Trixie, softly in the dark in the pink room, but could never say it at a normal level. It’s like that with Katya; Trixie puts her fingers inside of her and she asks for a gun.

“Let’s sleep on it.”

 

It is four-thirty in the morning, half an hour after the Vanguard padlocks up. The door to the townhouse opens; Trixie hears young musicians laughing and the stairs beginning to creak. She and Katya fake sleep. It was hours since they felt each other’s bodies. It always ended like that: intense and then nothing.

They have eaten three zucchini muffins each. _Come to the dance singing of love-_ Trixie has memorized the entire verse, but she is sure Saint Cath wrote it with a special, spiritual dance in mind, not the kind where you go under the bleachers with a boy. She breathes as slowly as her lungs will let her. She attempts to seal her skin, starting at the toes and working up. Her flannel nightie is as modest as Cath’s habit. After several minutes she sees, through her eyelashes, a doorway of light slice across Katya’s sleeping bag. She watches Dennis step with agility and night vision into the room and around the bag. He moves the edge of Trixie’s quilt, which she sewed herself, and sits, and his weight causes Trixie to tip toward him so their hips touch.

He strokes her hair.

I’m moldering, she thinks. I’m not actually _doing_ anything and I’m moldering. But between her toes she smells of tea-rose oil, and she knows she is responsible for sending scent molecules swimming through some primal part of his brain.

“Ew,” says Katya. “What are you doing?

“Checking on Trixie,” says Dennis. He rises, though. “Doesn’t someone check on you?” No, thinks Trixie, can’t you tell? No one ever checks on Katya. Somebody feeds her and keeps her clothed, but she is an untended soul. Dennis stands so close she can smell club smoke on his jeans; she can smell jazz. “What are _you_ doing?” says Dennis. He sounds genuinely interested.

“Watching you,” says Katya.

Dennis doesn’t speak. Trixie doesn’t move. She wonders if Katya is _drawing off_ now. It feels dangerous. _You better stop,_ she wants to say, but she is faking sleep.

 

Trixie loves how she and Katya can sit in certain ways and force certain male teachers to look at them. Sometimes the teachers stammer. Sometimes the armpits of their shirts get dark.

She and Katya have a code for it. They call it The Private Game.

 

Katya says: “What do you like, Dennis?”

“I am an honorable man,” says Dennis. But he does not leave.

Trixie imagines herself fragmenting into the Gustav Klimt lady, the one made of glinting squares of color and gold.

“You like giving back massages?” Katya says.

Trixie is sure she never said a word about Dennis touching her back. He doesn’t do it every time.

It is five hundred years after Cath wrote her poem: _Come to the dance singing of love, let her come dancing all afire. Desiring only him who created her and separated her from the dangerous worldly state._

As Trixie imagines it, Cath knew all about dangerous worldly states.

“I never go where I’m not invited,” says Dennis.

Under the heat of her quilt and the doomed, dark canopy, Trixie conjures Cath at midnight in the marquis’s house, faking sleep, waiting for her door to swing slowly open.

“I like back massages,” Katya’s voice is a cat weaving around an ankle. _You know the kind of mean I mean._ They have never pushed The Private Game this far. Trixie hears the longest unzipping sound in the universe, a sleeping bag, followed by the feathery sound of a T-shirt being pulled up. She opens one eye and sees what Dennis must see, what Trixie had seen only an hour ago: the lunar arc of breasts as Katya flips onto her stomach. Not drawing _off_ , thinks Trixie. _Drawing in._

“But if you make one move off my back,” says Katya, “it’s over.”

This is followed by the shifting of Dennis’s shape, then silence, rustling. Then silence. Trixie palms the hard, shiny egg under her pillow. She fakes sleep as hard as she can.

Here is Cath’s second miracle performed after death: though buried unpreserved, her body never molders. Despite eighteen days in the soil it emerges with the flesh resilient and still scented with tea rose.

Undefiled by men, undefiled by death.

“Excuse me,” Katya’s voice is a doorbell chime. “That is _not my back._ ”

Dennis rocks back on his heels. His voice is calm. “What did I do, Miss K? This is a back rub worthy of a saint.”

 

They have clocked many hours with Susannah, the Pleasant Grove psychologist, lying in their sweetest voices. Katya tells Susannah what she tells Trixie and the rest of the zip code 10011 and Planet Earth: that her parents pay her to live with her grandmother because her grandmother has immaculate degeneration and is going blind. Trixie tells Susannah that she plays jazz flute. She says her mother calls from the ashram twice a week and that her father helps with math and cooks bodacious dinners.

They were sent to Susannah for staring inappropriately at the male teachers and doing the Pearl Drops thing. “I don’t understand,” Trixie said sweetly. “I’m in trouble for paying attention? And I shouldn’t cross my legs? That’s it?”

 

“That,” says Katya, “that right there, that’s what I’m talking about. Quit it.”

The quilt on her bed was Trixie’s first. She made it by stitching scraps of Diana’s forsaken Jefferson Airplane T-shirt and Indian-print skirts and lace nighties to a blanket with white satin binding. She cut up wrap dresses Diana wore to her job. No one said she couldn't have the clothes; she took them from the closet. She doesn't use blankets anymore; she’s gone to the library. She knows about batting.

Where the quilted bits of Diana intersect, Trixie stitched down left-behind earrings, buttons, torn and lacquered pieces of Kodak photos stolen from Charlie’s albums. She spent months on her Tailor of Gloucester sewing.

Through her eyelashes she sees Katya burrow into her sleeping bag. “I don’t want a back rub anymore,” Katya says, and Trixie, in the womb of the quilt, marvels at the expansion of her own night-vocabulary. _Quit it. Don’t want. Anymore_.

“You can stop right now,” Katya says, and Trixie repeats to herself, _You can stop._

“Yes, my lady,” Dennis stands, his hair phosphorescent in the hallway light. His hands are still and pale at his sides, like gloves. Trixie wonders what shade of blue his balls are under his jeans and decides on cornflower. Blue balls are the point of the entire exercise, the heart of the Pearl Drops thing, the source of all their power.

“Does it hurt yet?” Katya says.

 

Sunday when Trixie comes home from the museum, Charlie summons her to the Steinway with a wave. No one puts anything on Charlie’s piano: no ashtrays, no sheet music, no beer bottles, no rosin, no wolf or BuzzWow mutes, no toilet paper hash pipes, no framed family photos because it’s never been that kind of house. Fantastic sound is thumping through the parlor, with a heavy backbeat that Trixie likes. She stares down Flynn, who flushes and studies his fingering. He spends a lot of time waiting his turn. He reminds her of one of those long-legged birds that take delicate steps with backward-hinged knees. When Charlie finally stops laying, Dennis lowers his horn, the snare stops clicking, and finally the winter draperies, which have stood though two summers in mournful dark red columns since Mimi’s departure, suck up the last of the sound. The room is half empty, not everyone plays every time, and Trixie has no idea if there's a schedule. Far beneath the jazz she hears the rattling of the air conditioner, which Charlie hates, but he has to keep the windows closed for the neighbors and stop by nine at night.

Some of the acolytes stare at her with fascinated and hungry eyes, for she has constant access to Charlie Mattel, and she is as untouchable to them as a veiled novice.

Trixie opens her arms and rotates slowly. “‘Come to the dance singing of love,’” she says, and feels her powers grow. “‘Let her come dancing all afire.’” It was in the book, and now it is the fold of her burning brain. She doesn't know what she is trying to provoke. She wants to prove she is protected.

Dennis laughs aloud. The laugh says, _You are beautiful when you are nuts._ Her father says, warningly, “Trixie.” She turns on him a gaze like a shield. Who knew she had a shield in her head and a saint in her backpack?

I hope you cleared your perpetually messy floor. I promised the cellists you’d share. A few days, Daughter.” The electric violinist, Gemma, shivers visibly as if the room has chilled. Everyone knows the cellists could double up with other acolytes. “Be generous,” says Charlie softly. He would resemble Christ, Trixie thinks, if his beard did not receive the trimmer and the comb- a weekly father-daughter ritual he taught her young and that she could live without.

“So,” she says tightly, “I’ll just go up and move my shit.”

Trixie turns away as the flautist, Radmila, plays a pattern of high notes. It’s water, dropping leaf to leaf through the rain forest canopy: Trixie can see it. _Don’t try to understand jazz,_ Dennis said once: _You are jazz._ A few times he has whispered, _You’re awake, aren’t you?_ She keeps faking sleep, as if she has left West Tenth and gone far away. Is she saving herself or is she moldering?

Charlie’s musicians start touching their instruments again. Trixie, stranded, takes the stairs alone to her pink shell of a room.

It’s too late.

The cello-shaped chick and her friend, kneeling at the bureau, are dropping her clothes piece by piece into two piles on the rug. Keepers, she realizes, and rejects. “The fuck you are,” says Trixie, and slams her fist into the open door.

They raise their porcelain faces. “We’re just borrowing.” The friend holds up a T-shirt that Trixie doctored with grommets and lace inserts. “This is gorgeous. He said we could share the room, so we figured…” Behind her, two cellos bask on the bed.

Trixie stalks in a grabs a cello by the throat. “You want to put that shit back?”  
When she and Katya talk like this in the girls’ room at school they can make anyone do anything. But these girls are older. They gaze at her, waiting to see what she has in mind for the hostage cello. Trixie jerks it hard. The instruments knock together and hum, and the girls clamber to their feet. “Clothes and whatever else you stole,” says Trixie. “Are those my earrings?”

Miss Cello works at her earlobes. “Please, may I have my cello?”

“Oh, are we at _please_ now?” says Trixie, buoyed. “If I let it go, will you leave the house?”

Miss Cello tugs a key from her pocket and turns it triumphantly in the air. “Charlie Mattel gave me this.”

“Cello,” Trixie reminds her.

Miss Cello only pretends to know joy on this earth: Trixie can feel it. Miss Cello keeps her gaze on the ground, on filthy stars of chewing-gum foil and bottle-cap planets. Whereas Cath, dead and in the soil for eighteen days, looked at the earth particles all around her and was awed by every turning molecule.

Trixie drags the cello off the Diana-quilt. It makes a scratching sound across the buttons and thumps to the rug. The first girl lunges for it, and Trixie draws back her foot and says, “I’ll kick it. I really don’t care.” She’s only wearing Converse, but the girls freeze in the frosted cupcake that is Trixie’s room. “You can have it in the morning,” she says, “if you don’t steal anything else.” Of course, they have already stolen everything.

She drags her prize into Dennis’s room, pulls it inside, closes the door, and considers. Then she looks back out into the hall. Miss Cello is darting down the stairs, and her friend leans out from the doorway of the pink room.

“You should know that Charlie does not give a fuck,” says Trixie.

“Seems like Charlie doesn’t give a fuck about his daughter, either,” says the friend.

Trixie picks up a yellow ceramic ashtray from Dennis’s bureau and hurls it. The girl ducks and laughs. The ashtray hits the door frame and falls without breaking. Miss Cello bolts back up stairs. “That bitch,” she says, and spots Trixie. Her eyes fill.

“I can’t go to school without my cello,” she says. “Why are you doing this?” If she got centered in that body of hers, she could be a totally different chick. Move like _this,_ Trixie wants to tell her, and you could have men aching to draw a bow across your hips. But Miss Cello doesn’t want power. She wants to feel safe. Trixie sees through the eyes of Cath that she will never be an artist.

“Charlie says give it back or get out.” The girl rubs her hands together frantically.

Trixie gazes at her until Miss Cello’s face contorts through several changes of expression. Give it back, or get out- this has to be a lie; Charlie has no time for the settling of squabbles. Her mother got out; she sloughed off West Tenth street to find God on the ashram in Boulder, Colorado. Mimi descended the stairs weeping, in the arms of two ambulance men. But Trixie will hold fast to her pink room the way Boston ivy grips to the sills outside the garden windows.

Heavy footsteps begin an ascent. Dennis’s white-blond head bobs into view. “Trixeleh,” says Dennis. He picks up his ashtray, sits on the top step, and stares at her through the spindles, ignoring the cellists. “Are you being a little troublemaker?”

“No,” Trixie wheels around and locks herself in Dennis’s bedroom with the cello. “I’m fucking things up majorly,” she yells through the door.

Sometimes she comes to the dance singing of love, and sometimes she is deep in the dangerous worldly state. She is not sure which would be accurate now. When Katya asked Dennis, _What do you like?_ it seemed like a good question. Trixie likes rubbing silver against clay until clay turns to pewter: alchemy.

Dennis’s room smells like socks. Outside his windows, a tree flips its leaves to their metallic backs. On the floor, the cello lies naked and bright.

Trixie drags it onto the unmade bed. She takes off the diamond ring her mother gave her, the one that belonged to Diana’s mother. She settles herself and with the diamond begins scratching an image onto the instruments back. In the hall, people knock and test the doorknob. Safe in the room, Trixie is making art. Through the windows, the sky bruises. Around her, honey-colored dust sifts onto the unwashed sheets.

Five minutes pass, an hour, she has no idea. Voices rise, and she ignores them.

When the door flies open, it slams in the corner of Dennis’s bureau so that everything on top jitters. Charlie, large in the doorway, does not look so Christ-like now. “If you don’t release that goddamn cello, Daughter,” he says, “you can get thee to a nunnery for all I care.”

Trixie slips her ring back on, grabs Dennis’s penknife off his night table and stands on the bed. The cello stands with her. It is her spruce-and-maple mother. It is her saint against temptation, though she can’t resist testing the hold on the pink room.

Watching Charlie, she opens the penknife, slides it against the fingerboard, and slits the thickest string. It snaps with a wiry groan. What was the other thing Katya asked that night? Her father crosses the threshold with an angry stride. She is scared, but this anger feels better than when he smiles her up and down. She steps behind the cello but looks him in the eye.

“Does it hurt yet?” she says.


	2. Chapter 2

“We’re just practicing,” says Katya.

“We’re just playing,” says Trixie.

“We’re just taking a walk.”

“Yeah, but we’re walking behind _them_ ,” says Trixie. She and Katya have turned right about twenty feet behind a couple who lean into each other, slowly strolling, and here is something Trixie has noticed: couples don’t attend to their surroundings the way solo walkers do. She wonders if the gun in her purse has a magnetic pull, if it wants to be near people.

“We’re losing them,” says Katya.

They’re playing robber girls. Before they took the gun out for a walk, Trixie and Katya were up in Trixie’s room wrapping tie-dye scarves around their heads to disguise their hair. They put on cheap lime-green earrings from Fourteenth Street to take attention off their features and T-shirts from Dennis’s room, across the hall, to hide their own tops.

The earrings and T-shirts will go in the trash right afterward, that’s the idea.

Would go. They’re just playing.

The man and the woman amble on through the purpling evening, past the trees that encroach on the sidewalk.

“Dennis didn’t mind you going through his stuff, huh?” Katya’s T-shirt says _LARRY CORYELL_ on the front and _THE ELEVENTH HOUSE_ on the back. Trixie’s says _CHICK COREA_. Hers is signed.

Trixie regards Katya as they walk. She wonders if the question is loaded. Katya is the only person on earth who knows about Dennis’s night visits. But they are best friends. Plus Trixie doesn’t want to be one of what her father calls _those eggshell people_.

She says, guardedly, “If he figures it out, he’ll be pissed. But he won’t. I’m never in his room.”

Ahead of them, the couple slows to look up at the window of a townhouse, and Trixie stalls by bending over to retie her sneaker lace.

Katya makes a little smirk sound in her nose. “Yeah, why would you be,” she says. “He’s in _your_ room every night.” Her hand fastens to her mouth. “Oh, no,” she says through her fingers. “It just came out. I’m sorry Trix.”

Inside Trixie’s purse, the gun beats like a heart. Its workings are a mystery. She and Katya were afraid to check if it had bullets because of the little lever that looks like another trigger. Trixie thinks the round part might be called a _chamber,_ which sounds romantic.

“It’s okay,” says Trixie. What else is it her father says? _Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke._

Through the darkness that drapes them all, she studies the woman who walks ahead of them. She’s tucked her sleek hair into her collar, implying some magnificent length- _Like mine_ , thinks Trixie- and she wears Frye boots,which make a lovely, horsey click on the sidewalk. It’s not enough for this chick to hold the man’s hand; she has to nestle both of their hands into the pocket of his leather jacket, a gesture that irritates Trixie and makes her think, bizarrely, of the airlessness of that pocket, of lying under her quilt at night, waiting to see if her door will open and faking sleep.

How do you say no to an innocent back rub? She had finally asked Katya that.

“It’s not okay,” says Katya. “I can read you. It was a shitty joke, Trix. It just came out. I don’t know why.”

As they walk on, Trixie can see what the man and woman stopped to admire: a red room hung floor to ceiling with paintings. “Really,” she says. “It’s okay.” She smiles sweetly at Katya. It isn’t clear who’s being punished by the sweetness.

What kills her is the woman’s cape. It flaps serenely behind her calves like a manta ray. Sometimes when Trixie meets her aunt Laurette for lunch, Laurette wears a cape, which connects it somehow with her mother.

“Swear it’s okay,” says Katya.

“I swear.” She is still smiling, and it is like smiling at Katya from across a long bridge. Trixie ought to get over it- seriously, fuck her if she can’t take a joke.

Katya exhales. “Okay.” They both watch the couple for a moment. Then, Katya says, “It’s not like I need the money.”

Trixie opens her mouth and closes it. She’s tempted to make a crack, but she holds it in. Katya’s been going on about her grandmother a lot- how she gets paid twenty dollars a week to live with her. How the grandmother is blind. Best friends for five years, and Katya has never invited Trixie home, so Trixie’s not buying. She’s never probed, though. Katya might detonate, or cry.

They’ve sped up, and now Trixie slows, partly so their footsteps won’t be heard, but partly because she is pissed off and wants to consider the ramifications- that she _is_ one of those eggshell people and fuck her because she cannot take this particular joke, and she suddenly has had it with the grandmother story, because Katya has never had a twenty in her pocket once. A perverse urge to find the fuse in Katya rises up in her. And it would be so easy. Katya is like one of those sea corals they saw in a bio-class movie that plant themselves any damn where they please but close up tight as a fist when brushed by something they mistrust. In fact the only thing they do trust is this one fish called a clown fish. Trixie isn’t anyone’s goddamn clown fish.

She says, “I know, Katya. You get twenty dollars a week to live with your grandmother.”

Katya looks at her slantwise and reaches deep into the bag on Trixie’s shoulder- _For the gun_ , Trixie thinks crazily, but it’s only for the pack of Marlboros.

“Check out that cape,” says Trixie. “That’s mine.” By now it feels like the cape might have belonged to her mother once, and she is simply reclaiming it.

“What’s that supposed to mean, about my grandmother?” Katya lights a cigarette and drops the pack into the bag.

Trixie wonders if she should be reeling Katya in right now, since they are playing robber girls. Besides, the grandmother is sacred territory. Trixie knows that without being told. Katya is tougher than Trixie, but she is also easier to hurt. Trixie knows _that_ without being told. She listens to the slow, steady hoofbeat of the Frye boots, satisfying as a pulse. Can you rob someone of her boots and cape? It’s okay to think these things, because they are just playing. They will veer off any minute. The woman looks back, appraises them with a glance, and dismisses them.

“I asked you what it means about my grandmother,” says Katya.

“It means your cup runneth over.” Trixie uses her musical voice. “If you’re getting twenty dollars a week.”

“I don’t have a cup.” Katya’s voice is low. “I have a savings account. I’m not supposed to touch it.”

“You must be rolling.” Now Trixie, too, reaches for the cigarettes, which they jointly own, and lets her knuckles bump the gun. “What bank?” She’s ultra casual. The gun is cold and could shoot off her foot, but the weight of it feels good. Already she knows she will stash it at the bottom of her school backpack, with her picture of Saint Cath.

“What _bank_? What is this, a fucking quiz? You don’t believe me." Reflexively Katya passes over her cigarette so Trixie can light hers.

“I want that cape, Kat.”

The couple turns left on Greenwich, walks a block, and crosses Barrow. Then they turn right on Morton. Trixie and Katya pick up their pace and fall back again, spooling out distance like kite string. It’s perfect; they’re all headed closer to the Hudson, where only true Villagers live and tourists rarely stray. Even from a half block back, Trixie knows the man is handsome, his hair dark and thick, the shape of his head suggesting broad cheekbones that ride high. Trixie wants this man to desire her even as he looks at the gun and fears her. If she can make him desire her, she’ll erase the feeling of Dennis’s fingers where they don’t belong, the feeling of Katya asking the difference between gay and not gay. Right now the feeling is a dent at the far edge of her left breast. It’s a pressure along her neck where he starts stroking her long hair. She wants the cape, and she wants some other things that the man and the woman have. The money doesn’t interest her.

“I have over a thousand dollars in Marine Midland Bank,” says Katya.

“I’m going to take her cape. You can have all their bread.”

“If you don’t believe me,” says Katya, “I’m not taking another step.”

“Oh?” says Trixie in the dangerously charming voice she saves for the final minutes with a victim in the girls’ room. “Do you really live with your grandmother? Or do you just not want me to meet your family?”

Katya stops. Let her, thinks Trixie, she won’t stop long. She keeps walking. By the time she makes half of Morton Street by herself, she is trying not to trudge; she is missing Katya acutely, missing the way she bumps into Trixie sometimes, the slight brushing of her jacket sleeve. Katya doesn’t often go in for hugging, but she finds other ways to make contact, the affectionate shove, the French braiding of each other’s hair, grabbing Trixie’s arm when she’s laughing particularly hard, touching the hand that holds the match. When she finally hears Katya approaching at a scuffing trot, she stops and waits, happy and faintly ashamed.

Katya says, “Gimme the goddamn bag, Trix.”

Trixie passes it over. She waits to see if Katya is going to detonate and what that will look like. She waits to see if Katya can take a joke.

“I’m sorry Kat.”

Katya looks into the bag as she cradles it in front of her, and Trixie knows she is looking at the darkly radiant gun, a gun Trixie stole from her father’s filing cabinet days earlier after one of his obnoxious sex talks. She’s spent a lot of secret time in her father’s room. She’s excavated the postcards her mother sends from the ashram. She’s stolen family photos from Charlie’s albums, one at a time. She’s found boxes of Ramses and a pair of leopard-print underwear for men. _I know what girls your age are doing._ The talks have escalated, and she hates them, Charlie loosely strung across a brocade parlor chair while she’s curled into her carapace to hide her breasts.

“I believe you,” says Trixie. “I do.”

In addition to the gun, Trixie stole her birth certificate from a file marked “Legal.” _Trixie Ann Mattel_. Who the fuck picked Ann, anyway? A girl named Ann would dance badly and her hip-huggers wouldn’t hug. If anyone kissed her, she’d wonder where the noses go. In dodgeball, if you were feeling mean, Ann would be the girl whose anxious face you’d aim for.

Maybe Ann is the reason her mother left.

No one knows Trixie’s middle name, not even Katya, and she knows every single other thing about Trixie. Katya knows it is a lie when Trixie says she plays jazz flute. She knows it is true that Trixie technically may almost have lost it to her father’s best friend. She knows it is a lie that Trixie will move to the ashram to be with her mother when she is seventeen. She knows all this, and she says nothing.

Ahead, near the corner of Washington, the couple sits on a townhouse stoop. They kiss and lean into each other.

“She’s blind,” says Katya. It takes a second to realize they are still talking about the grandmother. “I _told_ you.” They are standing less than half a block from the couple, watching obliquely. The man lights two cigarettes and passes one to the woman. Maybe they are just playing too, playing at being robbed. The man glances up the sidewalk and watches Trixie and Katya, still in conference.

“I get it,” says Trixie. “I believe you. I get it, Kat.”

They resume a slow walk toward the townhouse stoop. Trixie could swear she hears Katya thinking hard in her direction. She could swear she hears something like, _I’m lying, she’s not blind. The twenty dollars, that’s bullshit, too,_ and Trixie thinks back, _It’s okay, Kat, I love you anyway, and we’re going to just walk by these people, right?_ and she hears Katya think, _Of course we are, we’re just playing,_  when Katya drops her hand into the bag and says, “You don’t get anything.”

They are about a quarter block away. Less.

Alarmed, Trixie looks straight at the beautiful leonine man. “Don’t do it,” she says in a low voice. And then, because she knows it is too late, because it is not in her control, and because she wants to do it, too, she says quietly, “Don’t hurt anyone.”

Now the woman looks up. In about fifteen steps, if they keep walking, Trixie and Katya will reach the man and the woman on the stoop.

They keep walking, slowly.

Katya says, “There’s a safety, right? That’s what it’s for, right?” Her elbow is cocked; it’s obvious she’s about to draw something out of the bag, and now they are right there, steps from the man and the woman sitting and smoking on the stoop, and Trixie has no idea if there’s a safety or what a gun was doing in Charlie’s filing cabinet. She wants the man to look at her and lose all awareness of everything that is not Trixie, and he is, now, looking at her, but with the wrong expression. Quizzical. He looks quizzical, and the woman is checking his face to see what's changed. Katya stops. Trixie stops behind her. She imagines Katya stepping closer to the stoop and the man twisting her wrist so that the gun falls to the sidewalk and explodes, shooting someone in the ankle. But she wants that softly gliding cape, which she will wear to school, inciting fabulous waves of jealousy.

She could go somewhere around the treetops and look down from there. It’s a gift she has, one she likes to think her mother left her. The moment hurdles toward them. She has to decide fast. Katya faces the woman as if she were going to ask her directions. Her two hands shake around the gun, which is abruptly half out of the bag.

“This is a stickup,” she says, trembling, her voice hoarse, and Trixie is far from the treetops, she's right there, feeling the concrete through her shoes.

The woman slaps a hand over her mouth, stopping a laugh. “Central casting,” she whispers under her hand.

“The gun’s real,” says the man. “Shut up, Estelle.” Trixie has no idea what _wuthering_ means, but she thinks he must have that kind of face: brooding and gorgeous, from some dreamy old novel.

“Yeah, shut up, Estelle.” Katya sounds like she does in the girls’ room but with an undertow of fear. She says, “You guys live here or what?” Trixie feel the approaching moment thundering right up to her. She feels like someone who can take any kind of joke, now. She can’t wait to find out what her job will be.

The man and the woman say no and yes at the exact same moment. “Take our wallets,” says the man. “You don’t have to hurt anyone.”

“Be nice,” says Katya. “Invite us up.”

“If you’re going to do anything, do it here,” says the man. Estelle’s hand remains plastered to her mouth.

Trixie feels ravenous for what is about to happen. The sidewalk is pushing through the roads now. “I’m feeling kind of antsy down here,” she says in a voice that sounds like smoke and jazz. She has it down. “Take us upstairs, baby,” she tells the man.

Katya walks up the stoop and jabs the gun against Estelle’s knee. Saint Katya of the Girls’ Room- are they really in the same place, doing the same thing? Is it possible that Katya feels purification as she does this bad act? Trixie’s father’s words unspool from her body as if she is expelling a magician’s silk scarf: _They talk about this at school, don’t they? How girls your age are growing into their sexual powers?_ She feels the nape of her neck sealing itself against Dennis’s hand, and she looks at Estelle’s neck with rising irritation.

“Okay okay okay okay okay,” says Estelle, and gets up fast from the stoop.

“Hey, listen,” says Trixie, batting Katya on the arm. She almost says her name but catches herself. “I totally believe you. I do. I had one crazy moment of doubt, but it’s over. I’m sorry.” She waits while Katya closely scans her face as if she's not sure she’s seen it before.

“You still think I’m bullshitting,” says Katya, locking her gaze back on to her boyfriend and Estelle. “And you’re still mad from what I said about Dennis.”

Trixie is not afraid of Katya. She might be afraid of hurting Katya, though.

“I believe you to death,” says Trixie. “And it’s okay about Dennis. Come on. I’ll prove it. Let’s do something crazy.”

“Oh my God,” says Estelle. “Oh God oh God oh God.”

 

The brick building’s entry hall is lit with bare bulbs and its stairs are thickly carpeted. Glossy black doors, greenish walls- Trixie feel like she is at the bottom of a fish tank. “Go,” says Katya harshly, and the man looks at her jamming her purse, with the gun half in it, into Estelle’s back. “Don’t touch her,” he says, and immediately starts up the stairs. Trixie listens for sounds from other tenants and hears none. “I’m aiming right at Estelle’s spine,” says Katya, and while it seems to Trixie that the man could lunge back down the stairs at them, it also seems that the word _spine_ sounds menacingly like bone porcelain, and she is not afraid.

They climb, first him then Estelle and Katya in a kind of lockstep, then Trixie, the shag carpeting shushing their progress, until the man stops at the door on the third floor and Estelle sags against it. She says, “You don’t have to come in. You could turn around. We’ll give you everything.”

Katya holds the gun close to her own side, aimed at Estelle. “Oh, we can’t wait to see your apartment,” she says in a pretend-guest voice.

Trixie holds her hand out for both sets of keys; she sense Estelle and the boyfriend trying not to touch her palm. It makes her powers grow, holding their keys and keychains: such intimate objects. She opens the shiny black door, feels for a switch, and turns on the light.

“You’re not _kidding,_ we want to see it,” she says.

The apartment, a large studio with two tall windows, is painted a deep violet, as if an intense twilight has settled. In contrast, the trim and furnishings- a bureau, a table with chairs, and curvaceous bed frame- are painted bridal white. Trixie can’t believe it. She walks down a violet hall into which a Pullman kitchen is notched, flicking on lights as she goes. At the end, she opens the door to a violet bath. She wants to steal all the walls.

Behind her, she hears Katya telling the boyfriend and Estelle to sit on the bed, and how far apart.

“What color is this?” she calls from the bathroom, where the white shower curtain manages to look like a wedding gown against the violet walls.

“I mixed it.” Estelle is hyperventilating; she can hear it. “I’m a set designer.”

Trixie walks back down the hall and props herself against a white dining chair. Katya moves cautiously around the room, always watching Estelle and the boyfriend, lifting small objects off the bureau and nightstands and amassing a little pile of goods on the hearth. Rolls of coins. Bracelets. The gun never wavers. Trixie asks Estelle, “Yeah, but what do you _call_ it, this color?”

“Amethyst,” says Estelle. “It’s a glaze.”

“It’s incredible,” says Trixie. “It’s the most beautiful color I’ve ever seen.”

Estelle hugs herself and shivers. “Please point that somewhere else,” she asks Katya. “I swear I won’t do anything.”

“God, I love this place,” says Trixie. “Would you light me a cigarette? And may I have your cape, please?”

 

Trixie watches Katya collect sixty-three dollars from the two wallets tossed on the table and a fistful of silver earrings from a bureau drawer. It takes only a minute. Katya never stops watching Estelle and the boyfriend. She jams her prizes into the pocket of the boyfriend's leather jacket, which she is now wearing. Then she positions herself by the white marble hearth. Estelle and the boyfriend are not playing at being robbed. They sit on the edge of the bed about as far apart as they can while still holding hands- the holding hands was Katya’s concession.

Glancing at Katya, Trixie catches a sight of herself in the mirror over the hearth, luxuriant hair spilling out the back of the tie-dye scarf. “Look at us.” She gives Katya a light nudge. “Even with all this shit on, we’re still cute. We should take a Polaroid. You got a Polaroid, Estelle?”

Katya keeps the gun aimed straight at Estelle as she turns quickly to look at herself in the mirror, then at Trixie. Her shoulders slump a little. She looks back at Estelle but says, “How can you tell it’s still us?”

Trixie laughs. “You’re tripping, right?” Katya shrugs. They both know she hasn't tried acid yet. “Cause it looks like us,” says Trixie. “Right?”

“I’m not sure,” says Katya.

“You’re on blotter,” says Trixie, and waits for her to stop being spooky. Trixie once licked blotter off Dennis’s palm and spent hours watching the walls quilt themselves exquisitely, kaleidoscopically. “Who else would you think I am.” says Trixie. “Eric Harris?”

Katya has been telling Trixie of these two boys who shot up their school earlier in the year. Trixie was frightened by Katya’s fascination at first, but now she played along. Trixie and Katya: robber girls, school shooter girls, fake asleep girls.

“Could be. Don’t move,” Katya snaps at the boyfriend, who is edging closer to Estelle. “I _am_ tripping,” she says. “I don’t recognize myself.”

Trixie isn’t sure she recognizes this Katya either, the one who sees a stranger in her own face. “Ever?”

“That would be stupid. I mean, with the scarf on.”

It’s Trixie’s turn to _nosy around,_ as her father would say. She takes her time. Katya’s weirding her out. The nightstand clock says they've been there four minutes. Surely they can stay another four. In the silence she can hear the clock whir. The cape hangs heavy from her shoulders; it is too hot for the apartment, but the weight feels terrific.

On a closet shelf she finds a stack of typed and handwritten letters rubber banded in red. She takes it down and sets it aside on the bureau. “You don’t want that,” says Estelle, half rising. “It’s old, it’s junk-”

“I don’t always recognize people on TV, either,” says Katya. “Or at school. You think there's something wrong with me?”

“Yes.” Trixie goes back to the Pullman kitchen for a pair of shears.

“Well, then fuck you,” calls Katya.

“But there's plenty of shit wrong with me, too,” says Trixie, walking back in with the scissors.

She snips buttons from Estelle’s blouses, lace and beadwork from vintage sweaters, ribbons from a nightgown. She puts these on the bureau with the letters.

“In winter?” says Katya. “When you put a hat on? I’m not a hundred percent sure it’s you ‘til you say something.” She takes a deep breath and locks it up somewhere for a while. “At least I always know my grandmother.” She smiles; it’s a private, knowing smile. Trixie could almost swear there’s pride in it.

“Okay, Kat,” says Trixie.

“Maybe I could be Eric Harris, for real. You could be Dylan,” says Katya. Katya is always the one who holds the gun, memorizes the newspaper article, knows the names of every victim.

Trixie doesn’t respond. She bites her lip. She prowls the room more aggressively. She finds two photo albums at the foot of the hearth and begins robbing them of photographs. “Not my father,” says Estelle, and starts to cry. “Not my grandmother.”

“Who is this?” Trixie holds up a square color photo of a woman pretending to vamp in a one-piece bathing suit. The woman’s smile is playful, as if she is somebody’s mother who would never really, actually vamp. Mothers interest Trixie: their presence, their absence, the way they react to the heat waves her body gives off near their husbands and sons.

“No one,” says Estelle.

Trixie adds it to the stack. Estelle makes a keening sound in her throat. Trixie, moving on, seizes two black journals from a nightstand drawer.

“Oh my God, no,” says Estelle, but then she looks at Katya and the gun and closes her eyes.

Trixie turns abruptly to face Katya. “Look,” she says, “if you ever don’t know who someone is, just ask me, okay?”

“Do you think I’m crazy?”

“Just ask me.”

“Are we okay?”

Trixie sighs like of course they're okay, but she still hears it. _He gets into your room every night._

“Do you think I have schizophrenia?”

“Just _ask_ me,” Trixie says.

She goes down the hall again, cape flapping behind her; she salvages a grocery bag from under the sink, unclips the receiver from the hallway wall phone, and drops that in first. Then she drops in the letters, the cuttings, the photos, and the journals that she has piled on the bureau. The door lock, miraculously, requires a key on each side. She and Katya can actually lock these people in.

“Who’s the woman in the photo?” demands Trixie.

Estelle, crying, shakes her head.

“Take my watch,” the boyfriend tells Katya. “Leave her papers and take my watch. You'll get fifty dollars for it, I swear.”

“Thanks,” says Katya, as if startled by his generosity. She makes him give it to Estelle, who holds it out, shrinking from the gun.

“The papers?” he says. Trixie sees Katya admiring the watch, and she slips into a vision. She sees a tapestry made from scrap so handwriting and snippets of photos, tiny telegrams from the earth: patches of letters, strips of confessions, grainy faces of people who have, in one way or another, perhaps like her mothers, split. She’ll sew buttons at the intersections, layer in some lace. In Trixie’s hands, such things will assemble themselves into patterns as complex as snowflakes. She will start the tapestry tonight, in her pink room. What would Estelle do with this ephemera anyway, besides keep it closeted away?

“You have Paul’s watch,” whispers Estelle. “Can I have my papers?”

“Oh, it’s Paul?” Trixie looks at the boyfriend. “I don't have Paul's watch.” She doesn't, in fact, have a watch at all; she is waiting for her father to give up his. She swirls the cape and turns theatrically to Katya, who appears delicate in the leather jacket. “You have the watch, right?” Trixie sighs dramatically and runs her hands over the cape down the curves of her body, staring at Paul, who looks back at her with the directness of someone who respects the gun too much to move but is not exactly afraid. This intrigues Trixie tremendously.

“I thought Paul would like me better, but _she_ got the watch, so apparently not.” She’s just playing, but it seems to her that Katya looks at her sharply. “Listen,” she says to Katya, “let’s go. I’m great. I have every single thing I need.”

She is surprised to see hurt flash across Katya’s eyes.

“You’re great?” says Katya. “Why are you great? What've you got that you need?”

Paul sits forward.

“Shut up,” says Katya, though he hasn’t said anything

“Don’t,” says Trixie. She is holding her grocery bag with one arm and has one hand on the doorknob. “I said I believe you. Let’s go.” But Katya remained plastered to the hearth.

“What've you got that you need?” says Katya. When Trixie doesn’t answer, she says, “What? You’ve got an albino freak who-” She stops, possibly because Trixie is staring her down, possibly out of restraint.

“An albino freak who _what_?” mutters Paul.

Trixie looks at Katya, flaming against the amethyst walls, radiant in her distress. She feels the gaze of Paul upon her. “I have everything I need _from this apartment,_ ” she says, as if talking to someone from a distant land.

“Oh.” Katya visibly relaxed, as if warm water was being poured through her. “I don’t.” She turns a slow, thoughtful quarter circle, looking around the room.

“Oh no,” says Estelle. “Please go. Please please please go.”

“Get those scissors, would you?” says Katya, taking a step toward Estelle.

Trixie picks them up off the nightstand, where she’d set the down after taking souvenir snippets from Estelle’s clothes, and swings them from one finger. “What are you going to do, cut her hair?”

Katya smiles. “No, you are.”

“Really? Seriously”- again she almost says Katya’s name- “what are you planning to do with her hair?”

“Same thing i was going to do without it,” says Katya.

Estelle lets go of Paul’s hand, and clamps both her hands around her hair. “For Christ’s sake,” says Paul.

Trixie wonders if the gun belongs to Katya now. Estelle’s hair belongs to Estelle; that much is true. “No,” she says. “This is between me and you.”

“You said everything was okay,” Katya says. “You said you believed me. You said, ‘I’ll prove it.’”

“I think she's proven quite a bit,” says Paul.

“Whose boyfriend _are_ you? Be quiet,” says Katya, still pointing the gun at Estelle.

Saint Katya of apartment 3B. Saint Eric Harris of Columbine High. Saint Trixie of the third floor of the townhouse. There are guns in each place, there is motive everywhere. Katya won’t kill Estelle, probably, but she’ll bring a gun to the girls’ room and close her eyes and spin.

Trixie sets the grocery bag on the floor and puts her face in the bowl of her hands, scissors still dangling, so she can think. Katya is telling the truth now. It’s Trixie who’s lying; she does not believe a word about the grandmother, and things are not okay. She looks through her fingers from Estelle, who has wrapped her long hair protectively around her fist, to Katya, who waits to see if trust can be restored.

She almost asks again about the woman in the picture. It’s the right moment: she holds the scissors, and Katya holds the gun. Instead she takes a deep breath of amethyst air. “Forgive me,” she says, and for a moment, while neither Katya nor Estelle knows whose forgiveness she requires, she feels nearly free.

“Here,” says Trixie. She bends over quickly, so the tie-dye scarf falls forward and the violet room swings back, grabs a thick sheaf of her own long, blonde hair, and cuts.


	3. Chapter 3

On Monday Trixie witnesses the sorrow of Miss Honor Brennan, who wears a crucifix tucked under her clothes. Miss Brennan suggests they eat lunch together after class, at her desk. Revoltingly intimate, to see a teacher’s lunch, it’s homemade sandwich and nicked pear.

“I didn’t bring lunch.” Trixie holds her backpack to her chest and backs away.

She hesitates before stepping closer to the door, though. Katya has been freaking her out lately, all talk about their own personal Columbine during their lunches together.

“We wouldn’t fuck it up, like they did,” Katya said last week. “Our plan will be foolproof.”

“Yeah? We only have the one gun,” said Trixie.

“Hm,” Katya closed her eyes and Trixie could tell she was thinking hard. Trixie didn’t like seeing Katya like this, but she was also afraid of what would happen if she didn’t sit with Katya through it.

“Who would we kill first?” Trixie asked. Trixie had a few ideas, sometimes it excited her when they talked morbid.

“Leah Rodriguez, maybe?” said Katya, and they shared a look after that served as their form of laughter sometimes.

“I think I’d shoot Miss Brennan, first,” said Trixie, but the same look wasn’t shared.

In the classroom, Miss Brennan dangles a rumpled brown bag and says, “I’ll share.” She has a widow’s peak that sculpts her glowing, blue-eyed face into a heart. “I think you could use a chat.”

“I’m fine,” Trixie’s hand is on the doorknob. Curiosity and fear is keeping her in the science lab.

Trixie and Katya don’t always discuss the ways in which they could hold a gun to a classmate’s head. Sometimes they met in the teacher’s bathroom, where the door locks.

In her pink room, Trixie was usually the one fucking Katya, but school bathrooms had always made them adventurous.

“If I put three fingers into you, will you hide the gun in your backpack?” said Katya, the bathroom door locked, their lunches untouched in their packs on the floor.

In that moment, Trixie might have done anything to have Katya’s fingers inside of her. “Okay,” Trixie said, she was sitting on the sink counter-top, her legs already spread.

“Okay?” said Katya, and she moved her hands up Trixie’s thigh, pushing her pink skirt up.

Trixie didn’t find the gun talk all that sexy, but she found Katya breathtaking. She could say anything, whisper the syllables of _We could shoot up the school, you know_ in her cherry red lipstick and Trixie would be on her knees. Trixie shut her eyes and tried not to move in the wrong way as Katya’s fingers started sliding her underwear band down.

Of course Trixie would hide the gun, of course she would copy down the school’s blueprints- _You’re such a good artist_ Katya had breathed, as they studied the school layout in the library- of course they were just playing, it was a game, Katya didn’t even _know_ how to turn the safety off, how could they possibly be better than Eric and Dylan?

“You’re beautiful,” said Katya, and Trixie believed it. She couldn’t have Katya’s ring, middle, and index finger inside of her and be anything _but_ beautiful.

Sometimes in the bathroom, Katya cried, and neither of them took their clothes off. Sometimes they reenacted other people’s death. Sometimes Trixie was ravenous. Sometimes they didn’t even talk. If things ever got too bad, Trixie would unlock the door and leave.

In the classroom, Miss Brennan says,  “Yes, I agree you’re doing a tremendous job of holding it together. But people are saying things.” She touches her crucifix through the starched fabric of her blouse. Sometimes it works loose. Trixie has seen it. “I can’t believe they’re all true, but I’m asking you to stay and talk.” She is the prettiest teacher at school; she has to be dating one of the male teachers, right?

“Oh, for Chrissake,” says Trixie, but she doesn’t exactly fling herself out; she wants to hear what people are saying.

“Please,” says Miss Brennan, “sit, and tell me about your mother, Trixie. I understand she left.”

Trixie slowly closes the door. “She didn’t _leave_. My mother took a year to study Ashtanga Vinyasa yoga at an ashram in Boulder, Colorado.” She went to the library for this one. She goes to the library for everything. Miss Brennan looks at her steadily. “When she comes back she’ll be certified to teach it,” says Trixie. “We talk twice a week.”

Miss Brennan sucks in her lower lip and nods. “Sit down, Trixie.”

Trixie stays at the door. It’s either talk to Miss Brennan about how successful she actually was _without_ her mother around, or meet Katya in the teacher’s bathroom where there’d either be a gun, or a finger inside of her.

“Your father says she never calls. He didn’t make a secret of it at our parent-teacher conference. Please. Sit.”

“She calls when he’s not home.” Trixie scuffs over to a chair and drops her pack on it. “ _Obviously._ He doesn’t know we talk. We talk about art. She’s my _mother.”_

Miss Brennan gestures firmly at the chair. “You can always leave,” she says. “Have a pear.”

Trixie sits tangentially. First she dislodges her backpack. Then she shoves another chair out of the way. She does not have a pear.

“The teachers who care about you are wondering,” says Miss Brennan in the same soft voice, as if she were slowly wrapping Trixie in cashmere, “if you need help with your home situation. I don't mean to pry, but-” she takes a delicate bite of a sandwich, which has a petticoat of lettuce around the edges- “some teachers have heard it’s like a commune. The word _cult_ came up. Is it true, Trixie, that your father has a lot of young people living there?”

Trixie looks at her, amazed. Do people think her mother abandoned her to some cult?

“It’s none of your business,” she says.

“I’m making it my business.” Miss Brennan bites deep into her sandwich, and Trixie senses that she cannot, in fact, always leave.

“My father,” she says, “runs- it’s like a boarding school for brilliant jazz students. I live in a house full of music.” She chooses her words carefully. “It’s very creative,” she says. “My home is a very nurturing place.”

Miss Brennan pushes the pear closer to the edge of her desk. “Eat,” she says. “Where do these brilliant jazz students sleep?”

 _With Charlie,_  thinks Trixie. “It’s a five-story townhouse,” she says. “We have like a zillion bedrooms.”

“Is that enough?” says Miss Brennan. “Your father is very… charismatic. I’ve met him. Is there any… adult activity going on that might make you uncomfortable? Do you feel safe in that house, Trixie?”

“It’s _my house_. I feel two hundred percent safe.” Trixie stands, pushing the chair away. It screeches.

“People are concerned for you, Trixie. No one is gossiping. Don’t be angry.” Miss Brennan stands, too. “One more question. Please. Is it true there's a man living there who isn’t related to you?”

Trixie possesses an expression of baffled innocence, and she puts it on now. “Dennis? My cousin?” She waits for the doubt it register on Miss Brennan’s face. “He’s lived there since I was two.”

Miss Brennan says, “Your cousin.”

“He’s a genius on horn,” says Trixie. “He and my dad play in the best clubs.”

Miss Brennan nods. “Trixie,” she says, “if you ever need to chat, I’m here. It can be hard without a mom. I think things are tougher than you let on.”

The English teacher, Zack Weiss, always sits with Miss Brennan at lunch. And he is gorgeous, too. Mr. Piriello is fat, and Mr. Noble is craggy in a romantic way, but he is so old. So, Mr. Weiss. It is like matching up Barbie and Ken, Trixie thinks. Maybe there is something she can do with that. Maybe she could flirt with Mr. Weiss more. In her mind, she picks up her chair and smashes Miss Brennan’s head. Only when she can see the blood does she shoulder her backpack and say in her sweetest voice, “May I go now?”

 

The pietà by Jacques Bellange is the most delicious in the show at the Met, and Trixie is riveted. In the picture, Mary tips her head back and dips her fingers into the tiny bowl between her collarbones as if holy water might have collected there. Her face is radiant with pain.

It’s Monday afternoon, the afternoon of the humiliation. Trixie lets her backpack thud on the museum floor and pulls out her sketchbook.

A tour group shifts around the corner. Trixie feels it rather than sees it swelling behind her. “Ah, we love our art students.” The guide has a faint Germanic accent. “But this is the one you should be copying, Miss. It’s filled with contradiction. Come join us.”

 _Drop dead,_ thinks Trixie.

After a moment, he goes in his tour-guide voice, “Let us explore the tension in this engraving by Claude Mellan.”

Trixie balances her sketchbook on one arm. The Mary in the pietà is a real woman, not like the stiff ones from the 1400s. She doesn't try to copy the pietà precisely, with its fine hatch marks. Rather she wants to capture the curve of Mary’s neck, the folds in her garment, the muscles in the thigh of the Christ.

Never has she seen such muscles in the thigh of a Christ.

“We see Mary Magdalene with two symbols of the religious contemplative,” says the guide, and from his accent Trixie imagines him with skis in the Alps. “The cross and the skull,” says the guide. “We don’t know why Mellan omitted the third symbol, the book. And yet, and yet. Look at her, this reformed prostitute. Her robes have slipped. Her hair is undone. She’s a lush young woman, our Magdalene. This is a typical pose for her, during her desert days.”

Trixie totally sees it. Spiritual, pretty, a little loose, deep into her thoughts, not a big reader. Hair to her waist.

She refuses to look.

In the Bellange pietà, the Mother Mary sits with her legs apart and the body of Jesus on his knees between them, facing the viewer. This Mary is not embarrassed about any damn things. She may be pure, but she is still a sensual, fleshy woman, caught up in grief    
The thing Trixie doesn’t get, as she sketches, is how the Christ stay upright, kneeling, if he’s dead. Every muscle is delineated. His nipples are erect. A fold of Mary’s hem flutters up strategically across his hip.

“So I wonder,” says the guide, as if musing to himself, “does she know? Is Mary Magdalene so transported by religious fervor that she does not realize her bosom is bared? Or are the artists telling us, once a whore, always a whore?”

Trixie hears tittering and turns, furious. The engraving is small, but she can tell right away that the Magdalene, a big-boned, dark-haired sexy chick, is dreaming away. She could almost be Mary’s daughter. “Can’t you fucking _tell?_ ” says Trixie loudly, causing a guard to take several decisive steps toward her. “She’s like totally transported. Jesus Christ.”

 

Tuesday, from the fifth row, Trixie stares at Miss Brennan as if eleventh-grade chemistry might save her life. Her gaze savors the heart-shaped face and locks onto the electric-blue irises. Obviously she’s listening, right?

Meanwhile, she inches her arm over to the wall where the Erlenmeyer flasks are lined up. Then she closes her hand around one.

She feels Katya encouraging her, without eye contact, from the front of the room. Miss Brennan separates them. A bunch of teachers separate them, especially in gym. They don’t know it strengthens Trixie to feed on Katya’s energy from a distance, to know what Katya is thinking without meeting her eyes. Like right now, Katya is thinking, _I dare you to eat the egg afterward. Real slow_.

Trixie pretends she doesn’t even know what her hand is doing with the flask because she is so riveted by Miss Brennan’s every word. Miss Brennan is gorgeous, even if she is like thirty. She looks like Wonder Woman.

One thing Trixie knows for sure is how to coax the fat glimmering hard-boiled egg in her lunch bag down the skinny neck of the Erlenmeyer flask.

When she has slid the flask right in front of her, she dips her hand into her backpack, finds her lunch, and slips the peeled hard-boiled egg out of its baggie, never taking her gaze off Honor Brennan.

She balances the egg on the lip of the flask, where it nests, ovoid and shiny, stuck on the neck of the bottle like a fat stopper.

Miss Brennan radars onto her. “Absolutely not,” she says. “What lab are _you_ doing?” In that moment- Trixie can feel it- Miss Brennan loses Andy Sakellarios, who looks at the egg and laughs hoarsely. She loses Katya, separated by four lab tables but communicated mischief telepathically. She loses Mary Gage, who peers over the collar of her rabbit-fur jacket with wide eyes.

“Egg,” says Miss Brennan, pointing at it. “Trash,” pointing near her desk. “Immediately.” She loses Leah Rodriguez, who glances only at the base of the flask, and Trixie knows why: she’s afraid to look Trixie in the eye.

 _Hard to handle,_ Trixie thinks. _That’s what they say when they talk about me._

She flips her hair over her shoulder, a long, sensuous gesture involving a dramatic arm flourish, because her hair comes down past her waist.

“Miss Brennan?” she says sweetly. “I really, really want to make this egg go down this hole. It’ll just take a minute. Please? It’s science.”

Trixie keeps her voice low and says _hole_ as if she were blowing a smoke ring, or a kiss, which makes the boys grin.

“It’s third-grade science,” says Miss Brennan, “and there is no food in my class. Throw it out, now, Trixie. I’m not kidding.”

Trixie is busy. It’s this thing she does with her hair, combining it with her fingers, looking around, catching her friends’ eyes and laughing- she has it down. “But I _like_ third-grade science,” she says in a little-girl voice. She thrusts her shoulders back. If Miss Brennan is having sex with a male teacher, she wants her to think about that teacher trying not to look at Trixie’s bust in class. Miss B doesn’t have that kind of bust, the kind her own father has special words for. “I have a lighter,” Trixie entreats- her way of saying that she smokes, in case there is still someone who doesn’t know- and she tears a thick strip of paper out of her notebook. “Please? Can I? It’ll take ten seconds.”

She flicks the lighter and waits. The flame wavers near her thumb. The class is mesmerized.

“You are this close to detention. But ten seconds, yes,” says Miss Brennan, and Trixie knows what she's thinking: _Abandoned girl, confused girl, give her a little rope_.

Trixie is running the class now. “Oooh,” she says, “thank you,” and squirms on her stool. She takes the egg off the neck of the Erlenmeyer flask. She lights the strip of paper on fire, drops it into the flask, and sets the egg on top again.

It takes only a moment for the air pressure inside to decrease and for the flask to suck in the egg, for the egg to stretch and narrow itself into the neck of the flask. The egg plops down inside with a tiny bounce, lands on the charred paper, and puts out the flame.

“Oh, my God, I love that,” cries Trixie. “Thank you, Miss Brennan.”

Miss Brennan thrusts her hand out and says, “Flask, Trixie. That happened because the air pressure inside did what? Andy?”

But Andy Sak has his back to her and is looking directly at Trixie. When it’s clear he won’t turn away. Trixie lifts the flask, joggles it until the egg is in position, and blows into the opening.

Not one eye is on Miss Brennan.

“Trixie, get up here. Bring the flask.” Miss Brennan slaps the edge of the desk. “At the board, Trixie, Now. I want the formula for pressure versus temperature if a gas is at a constant volume. Now.”

“I have to get it out,” says Trixie helplessly, and holds the flask upended over her palm. The egg narrows again, slithers into the neck of the flask, and drops neatly, warmly, wetly, into her hand.

“Lunch,” she sings.

“Five points off your grade,” says Miss Brennan. “Throw out the egg and write the formula.”

“It’s got _p_ ’s and _t_ ’s,” says Trixie. “But I forgot it exactly. I’m sorry.” She looks contrite. Then she talks a slow bite of the egg. _This is for you, Katya_.

“Ten points off. Throw out the egg,” says Miss Brennan. “I know why you are doing this, Trixie. But just because you have trouble at home doesn't mean you get to inflict it on us.”

The silence in the room creaks and shifts. Someone coughs. Trixie stares into the eyes of Miss Brennan as if to drill a hole in her skull.

“It’s. My. Lunch,” she says softly. She extends the tip of her tongue, which she knows is pretty because she has studied it in the mirror, and licks a bit of ash off the egg. The heads of boys lock almost audibly into position.

Miss Brennan picks up her wastebasket, walks over to Trixie, and slams it on the floor. “Drop it,” she says through her teeth.

“I’m hungry.” Trixie knows she is going too far, but Miss Brennan went farther, and besides, she no longer knows how to throw out the egg.

Across the aisle Angeline Yost whispers, “Fight, fight.” Leah laughs, but when Trixie angles her a look she goes to work at a fingernail with her teeth. Miss Brennan’s eyes are bright as glass. “In addition to ten points,” Miss Brennan says, “you have detention.”

Trixie mouths a word that is silent but unmistakable and takes another bite of the egg. Leah emits a tiny gasp.

“Detention is Mr. Weiss today, isn't it, Miss Brennan?” says Trixie. “You know his schedule, right?”

She holds the half-eaten egg high above the trash can and waits, watching Miss Brennan’s face until color flows into it. “Thought so,” she says. She drops the egg into the trash. It thumps.

Earlier that semester Trixie went to the library, her second-favorite place, and looked up the name. She held the word close until she needed it.

“ _Brennan,_ ” she says musically, deciding that today, even if she loses, she wins. “That means ‘sorrow’ in Irish, right?”

 

Mr. Weiss’s classroom has pictures of the authors around the room. George Eliot, who was a woman. Fitzgerald, whose wife was crazy. There is no keeping up with English lit; you could read and read and never get through it, whereas one day she will have seen every painting in every museum in New York City.

“Can I sketch?” says Trixie from the doorway.

“You can do homework, in silence, Trixie.”

She bites her lower lip as if a camera were trained on her, but Mr. Weiss just sits at his desk reading student essays. He has his aviator glasses on, and his hair is as dark and lush as Miss Brennan's. Sometimes they share a Thermos- they _have_ to be having sex, Trixie thinks. Their _hair_ has to be having sex.

She takes a seat in the front row were she will be maximally distracting and watches his pupils dart back and forth, tracking the handwriting. _Her_ handwriting. He makes notes with a red Bic pen.

“Mr. Weiss,” she says softly. “I have a problem.”

“You do,” he says, without looking up. “You’re talking.”

“That’s not it,” she whispers. She has no idea what she is going to say next. She is all out of hard-boiled eggs.

“You have a problem with this essay,” he says. He looks up and seems to realize, suddenly, that he has a chance to connect with her. “This could be a good time to work on it, actually. You don’t fully support your thesis. Here, where you talk about the relationship between wealth and honor-”

Honor Brennan. Dishonor Brennan.

“I don’t remember what I wrote,” says Trixie, and rises from her chair. “I have to see.”

“Stay right there,” says Mr. Weiss. His voice is a closed door.

“I just need to see,” she says in her little-girl voice. She plants her palms on the front of his desk and leans forward. And then Mr. Weiss says something that doesn’t make sense.

“I’m bulletproof, Trixie.” He looks directly into her eyes. “Are you?”

At that moment Honor Brennan knocks and steps into the classroom with textbooks in her arms. She looks from Zack Weiss to Trixie’s chest and says drily, “Am I interrupting?”

Trixie scuffs back to her seat but turns it sideways. She opens her knees wide, like Mr. Bellange’s Mary, and sprawls.

“I thought I’d take over, Zack,” Miss Brennan says. “Trixie and I have a few things to iron out.”

“Oh, Jesus,” says Trixie.

“I’ll meet you in the lounge,” Mr. Weiss tells Miss Brennan. To Trixie he gives a small, courteous nod.

“Leave me a ciggie, Zack,” says Trixie, but he doesn’t even smile. When the door closes, Miss Brennan perches on the edge of the desk. Trixie bobs out of the chair and starts pacing. “I need a smoke,” she says.

Miss Brennan keeps the textbook on her lap. _Shield,_  thinks Trixie. “Once again I find myself asking you to sit,” say Miss Brennan.

“I’m done sitting. I’m done _talking._ ” At the back of the classroom, Trixie looks out the window over East Eighty-Seventh Street, where kids leave school and stream down the block as if they had all the time in the world. “I need a cigarette,” she says.

When she turns and sees Miss Brennan, though, she realizes she is wrong. The cigarette is nothing. Miss Brennan, gazing at her and fingering her hidden crucifix, is the one with the need. She needs to fix Trixie Mattel.

Trixie knows she doesn’t need to be fixed, not really. What she wants now is to find Katya and tell her she’ll hide the gun, tell her she knows what the Columbine kids did wrong- they cared too much about the legacy and not enough about the people.

Trixie stares at the dagger’s point of hair on her teacher’s forehead, opens and closes her mouth a few times, and says, “Miss Brennan.” Then she falters.

She is _so good_.

“Yes, Trixie?”

“I want-” She looks at the floor.

“What is it, Trixie? What’s troubling you?”

She hesitates. “It’s embarrassing.”

Miss Brennan leans forward. “You can tell me anything, Trixie.”

In a voice not much above a whisper, Trixie says to the floor, “I just need to be held.”

“You- oh, I knew there was something under all that behavior.”

Trixie holds her ground and waits.

Miss Brennan puts her books on the desk. She walks all the way down the aisle. She wears black trousers with low heels and a white cotton blouse buttoned to her neck and a gold cross where Trixie can’t see it. She clasps Trixie’s upper arms, looks at her searchingly for a moment, and then enfolds her.

She smells of perfume, deodorant soap, and a tiny bit of sweat. Trixie likes it. It is the smell of Wonder Woman. Miss Brennan hugs her the way women hug, shoulders touching but with a natural distance between the chests. Trixie counts to five, then slowly begins to melt into the shape of that distance. When she inhales, her breasts press into Miss Brennan’s breasts. When she exhales, her breath washes over Miss Brennan’s neck and disturbs her thick, dark hair.

Miss Brennan seems to have stopped breathing.

“Oh, my God,” says Trixie, her arms around Miss Brennan’s waist. She is alive, she is incredibly alive, she is running the class. “Miss Brennan,” she whispers, “will you do something for me?”

Miss Brennan begins to disengage from the hug like a cat that has been held too long. “What is it, Trixie,” she says.

“Will you kiss me?”

Miss Brennan steps abruptly back, although they are still, in some way, interlocked. Trixie feels herself scrutinized. She turns her face away and bites the side of her thumbnail. She gives Miss Brennan time to recollect how an abandoned girl would be- troubled, shy, desperate for affection.

Miss Brennan hesitates, then swiftly leans in and kisses Trixie on the cheek.

Trixie touches her fingertips to the side of Miss Brennan’s face.

Then she touches her lips to Miss Brennan’s mouth.

For one second, two seconds, there is only shock.

Then Trixie could swear Miss Brennan moves her mouth, or perhaps it is just her head, ever so slightly.

And for a second or two after that, it’s as if their hair is kissing. But already Trixie’s brain is working on another problem. She tips her head back, exposing the tiny bowl between her collarbones. She ignores the little cry of disgust, or is it despair, from Miss Brennan, and the firm shove, and she thinks about what's wrong with Jacques Bellange pietà- what is wrong, in fact, with every pietà in the Met, right?

“I gotta go,” she says, and she stalks to the front of the room to grab her backpack. She barely notices Miss Brennan wiping her mouth on her sleeve, barely heard her calling, “Trixie. Don't you dare walk out on this.” Studio Art II has oil pastel crayons; maybe the door isn’t locked. In _her_ pietà, the person draped between the Virgin’s knees will be Mary Magdalene, very much alive, a loose, dreamy chick who doesn’t like to read, who knows exactly how to turn the safety off; and the Virgin Mother's face will be lit not by sorrow but by rapture and the fiercest love.


	4. Chapter 4

“Say it,” says Trixie. She lounges against a steel countertop, scarred and waxy dissection trays lined up behind her. “ _I ride the bus_. Say it.”

Lunchtime: the science lab at Pleasant Grove School is deserted. Katya, glowing with menace blocks the door. We’re the lionesses, Trixie thinks.

Leah Rodriguez is the giraffe. She stands locked by fear behind Miss Brennan’s desk. Taxi horns filter through the windows. Trixie stares with arms crossed, daring Leah to look up and escalate things.

The girl appears to be counting floor tiles. She would be so easy to fix, Trixie thinks. Her hair French-braided, some coppery eyeshadow to bring out the light in her eyes. Tighter jeans- Trixie can totally sew. She would teach Leah to dance. She and Katya could make it a project.

Then Trixie could decide if Leah was an acolyte or a friend.

“She doesn't know what the bus is.” Katya drops into a plié. Everyone knows what the bus is; it’s for crippled kids and poor kids who get into schools in better neighborhoods. At least this is how the insult goes.

“Say _I ride the bus_ ,” says Trixie, “or I’ll soak you.” She lifts a beaker off a shelf and moves toward the sink. If Leah gets wet she’ll panic and change into her gym shirt. Whereas if Trixie had the wet top, she’d laugh with fake mortification at her Sophia Loren bust. That’s what her father calls it, her Sophia Loren Bust, except he uses a different word.

“All right, now you have to say _I want to give Andy Sak a rim job_.” She and Katya exchange a glance. For days they have marveled at this whirring phrase that sounds half mechanical and half obscene. Rim, lid, edges, jars- maybe it was something to do with nipples, Trixie thinks. Or maybe it is a bluff or a misunderstanding.

“Okay, Trix, do it,” Katya says.

Trixie sets the beaker in the sink, turns on the tap, and grabs a bottle of formaldehyde. “Guess which,” she blocks Leah’s view as she pretends to pour.

“I ride the bus.” Leah crosses her hands over her chest and watches warily as Trixie approaches with the brimming beaker.

Trixie gives Leah the sweet, sorrowful smile she might give a small child who’s resisting bedtime. She feels in herself the power to make Leah trust her, to maybe drink from the beaker. Her father has acolytes- it might be cool to have on of her own.

“I ride the bus,” says Leah. “Let me out, okay?”

“Too late,” says Katya, “you were supposed to say about the rim job,” and Trixie, the word _rim_ humming in her brain, approaches the girl sliding along the wall.

  


This is new, and Trixie hates it: Katya has just two hours after school, and her grandmother believes that time is for Bible study.

They have been getting brave in their plans, bringing detailed notes to school, looking students in the eyes and then writing names down. Before the new two hour rule, they would walk down different streets, looking for vacant houses to break into. They needed another gun, that was the new goal.

But now there is the two hour rule and Trixie has gone from agnostic to atheist when it comes to believing in the unseen grandmother. Katya’s real family must be drunk, mean, or naked. Don’t hide it, Trixie wants to tell her- who wants to be best friends with some normal-family chick?

After school they maneuver around the little crowd listening outside the townhouse and enter the foyer, where jazz blared from the parlor. Charlie is on the Steinway, his body rocking, hair falling in his face, and Trixie, watching his hands pump, wonders not for the first time if he is pushing music into the massive piano or somehow pulling it out. Gemma, the English acolyte whom Charlie found playing in the Times Square subway, whipsaws her bow across the electric violin, which Trixie thinks is the prettiest sound in the world. Her eyelids flutter when she plays. Radmila is on electric flute, and Flynn is there, waiting to play and staring at Trixie. He has a paperback crammed into his back pocket She has never seen another acolyte with a book.

“Ignore them,” says Trixie, because lately Katya has been lingering in the parlor doorway like a climbing vine, dribbling away precious ticks of her already diminished one hundred twenty minutes.

Sometimes Trixie doesn’t understand Katya. Katya will sit with Trixie in the library and research the Columbine boys until her eyes crossed. And she would whisper across the table, “Is it _too_ much to do it on a Monday? Like everyone already says they hate Mondays, is it too predictable?” and Trixie would have to nod her head and say, “Well, gee, Katya, I don’t know. It might be nicer to do it on a Monday, that way the families can plan the funerals for the weekend. But then again, Columbine was on a Tuesday and isn’t the whole _point_ that we are them, only prettier?” Katya would soak in what Trixie had just said.

“I guess the least we can do is give the families a weekend funeral,” said Katya.

“Monday it is.”

 

In the foyer, the brass is glinting, the piano is brilliant, and Katya snags on the doorframe. Trixie doubles back to tug at her and sees Charlie wave _cut_.

“The delectable Miss Zamo,” says Charlie, and Trixie watches Katya respond as if she were being tuned. Her shoulders pull back, a hip curves out, and she looks down with a shy smile.

“Come on, Kat.”

“Do you like what you hear, Katya?” Charlie asks, as if the fates of his young musicians, who wait patient as horses, are in her hands, or as if, perhaps, he is talking about something else entirely.

Katya glances at Trixie. Then, almost imperceptibly, she nods to Charlie. Trixie shakes her head and goes back to eye-flirting with Flynn. Charlie's daughter may be off-limits to the male acolytes, but she and Flynn have been trying without words to arrange a meeting. Every time Trixie looks up, meaning _roof,_  he frowns at the ceiling, perhaps meaning, _Where the chandelier used to be?_ Or else, _In your bedroom, are you out of your mind?_ She is not out of her mind. She is sixteen and on the pill and her best friend kisses her sometimes but then lingers at the door when her father talks to her. _A girl your age is a fully opened flower,_ her father says.

“It’s still in composition,” says Charlie. “But if you respond to the finished piece, let us name it in your honor. ‘The Katya Temptation.’ What think you, Dennis?”

“Tell him it sucks, Kat,” says Trixie. Charlie is stealing everything: her two hours, her best friend, the light he normally shines on her.

Or maybe Katya is the thief.

“It’s not about you, Katya,” says Trixie. “He might as well call it ‘The Charlie Ego.’”

Charlie laughs deeply. Gemma raises her bow and produces a ribbon of sound, but Charlie raises is hand. “One more thing,” he says, and Trixie feels his interest sweep across her like a searchlight before it turns to Katya. “How’s the clarinet coming?”

Katya inhales sharply.

“Did you forget to tell her, Miss Temptation?”

“How’s your _clarinet_?” demands Trixie. _Misstemptation_ sounds to her like a yearning gone wrong. “Katya doesn’t take clarinet. She doesn't take anything.”

“I do,” says Katya quietly. “At school. It’s coming fine.”

“You don’t have a clarinet.” Trixie wallows; this is not what she means. Charlie smiles. All the acolytes are looking at them. Katya doesn’t have a clarinet, she has Trixie and red lipstick and a blue notebook filled with the beginnings of the suicide notes they’re going to leave in their pockets in exactly two Mondays.

“I showed her the fingering,” says Charlie. “She might have a nascent talent.”

He showed her the fingering- and where was Trixie? Upstairs, thinking Katya had gone home? Upstairs practicing holding a gun in her hands and pointing it at her reflection, then her own head? She can see it, how he stood behind Katya Zamo, placed his hands over hers, inhaled her hair, his attention like the light from a star that has wheeled in close. Closer. Oh, Katya. No wonder she didn't’ tell: she fell.

“Nascent, that's great,” says Trixie. “Are you coming or not?”

“Five minutes.”

Charlie pounds out two notes, both flat. The bass and violin start up. Trixie takes the two flights of stairs alone to her pink room with the light tread of someone whose fury is as weightless as the air she breathes and gets through an entire side of _Ziggy Stardust_ before Katya, looking smug and at least embarrassed, appears with the clarinet case.

“Loaner,” she says. She looks helplessly around the room, cradling the case in her arms. “Where should I put this?”

  


What Trixie’s doing in art is developing her métier. Mr. Knecht says every artist has one, and every student must seek one, and Trixie’s is making tapestries. She uses everything: cloth, photographs, lists, snippets of lace, buttons, earrings, ribbon, even bits of flat scrap metal. Mr. K lets her go her own way while the rest of Studio Art II makes linocuts.

The other thing she’s doing in art, on this bright blue afternoon, is harassing Leah. The girl is carving a face over linoleum block with a stiff anxiety that dulls her work. Mr. Knecht, oblivious to the hazards of placing two lionesses with a giraffe, has seated her with Trixie and Katya. Katya can’t draw well either, but she has the advantage of not giving a fuck. Also, she has the advantage of Trixie, who leans over when Mr. Knecht isn’t looking and lightly chisels Katya’s linoleum, adding gesture and grace.

Every time Trixie starts to ask Katya to come over, she hesitates; she envisions Charlie giving her breathing lessons from behind, breathing being a big deal for musicians. _Breathe from here_ , she imagines him saying, his hands over her lower abdomen where- as she conceives the body- clothes tumble round in a hot dryer, and then, sliding one hand up to her breastbone, _not from here,_ he would say, and it would be pure Charlie to do this, and it makes Trixie sick.

She wonders if she can tell Katya to leave the goddamn clarinet at home. She is afraid that Katya might bring the loaner, swing it insouciantly, like a purse.

Trixie wonders if that was the whole point, to make her jealous. Sometimes when Katya would make her read their Columbine notes, Trixie would be disinterested, and it made Katya mad.

“You’re not backing out, right?” Katya said.

“‘Course not, I have a list of my own,” said Trixie. She did have a list, written in pink pen of everyone she wanted to shoot. But still, Katya would go over and over the notes, write the lists, practicing keeping the gun at their hip, and Trixie would want to shut her eyes and sleep. Katya must know the way to get her attention was her father.

 

“You know what your problem is?” Trixie tells Leah in art class.

Katya looks up form the worktable, interested. She is carving a deer under falling leaves. The deer stands on legs of exquisite delicacy, courtesy of Trixie.

Katya leans across the worktable, threatening Leah’s linocut with a sharp instrument. “Yeah, let’s discuss your problem,” she tells Leah. “I bet I can fix it.” Leah raises an arm to keep Katya’s gouge off her work but doesn't look up, eye contact being a flammable act.

Trixie puts a restraining hand on Katya’s wrist. “Don’t,” she says. She likes how both Leah and her linocut-girl are desperately in need of _style_. She thinks of Gemma, who arrived at West Tenth Street skittish and grateful, and who slid into a sensuous indolence encouraged and shaped by Charlie. “Seriously,” Trixie tells Leah, not sure whether she’s talking about art or life or both, “your problem is you’re afraid to make a mistake.”

“You’re _helping_ her?” says Katya, gouge still poised for damage.

Why not, Trixie wants to say, what have you learned about loyalty, hanging out at my house? Leah was second on Trixie’s list, third on Katya’s. Trixie grabs a pencil and draws directly on the worktable between her and Leah: linocut-girl’s oval face, the swirling hair. “For Chrissake, would you _look_? We have fifteen minutes.” Leah, after a wide-eyed moment, watches the pencil move. “This is shading.” Trixie makes rapid straight lines to delineate cheekbones and chin.

“Next you’ll be teaching her jazz flute,” says Katya.

“Would you relax?” says Trixie. “We’re going to give her a makeover. We’re going to French-braid her hair. Look,” she tells Leah, “mistakes are okay. Look what I did. I hacked it off.” She leans forward and lifts a thick, chopped-off hank of her own hair. “If you’re afraid of something, do it,” she says. That’s what Charlie tells her, anyway.

“All right,” says Leah suddenly. She starts carving cheekbone lines. Trixie thinks, I’m getting good at this acolyte business.

“We could pluck her eyebrows,” says Katya darkly. “It only hurts the first time.”

“Just braids,” says Trixie. “You’re both coming to my house Saturday.”

“I have to be with my grandmother,” says Katya.

“Sunday?”

“Grandmother.” Katya chisels a leaf with intense concentration.

“Then Friday after school,” says Trixie. “Two hours. Come on.” This Friday will be the last school day before Trixie and Katya’s rampage.

Leah looks up from a place deep inside her work and says, “Am I doing this right?” It is the first sentence she has uttered to Trixie Mattel on an equal footing, and Trixie, with pleasure and surprise, realizes that her powers sharpen when she opens the cage door, not when she locks Leah in. She wonders if this is what her father felt when he first put a fiddle with a piezoelectric body pickup in Gemma’s arms. Piezoelectric body pickup, she loves saying that, the way it sounds half high-voltage and half slut.

“Try some cross-hatching. But yeah.” To Katya she says, “Friday, right? And listen- don’t bring the clarinet.”

Katya looks at her sharply. Leah drops her head low over her linoleum block, a tumble of red hair concealing her face. Trixie touches her arm and says, “We promise not to be bitches.”

“Speak for yourself,” says Katya. “Charlie told me to bring it every time.”

  


Leah sits frozen on the dressing-table stool in Trixie’s pink room while Trixie and Katya cross and recross the length of hair they're braiding flat against her head. If she’s breathing, Trixie can’t tell.

The girl has a Renaissance face, half beautiful and half plain. “You look like a Botticelli,” Trixie says.

“Andy Sak might like her when we’re done with her,” says Katya.

Leah winces, though it might be from how Katya comes out each new section with a yank. “Botticelli,” she murmurs. “He did Venus on that shell.”

“Goddamn,” says Trixie. “I should have talked to you sooner. We should go to the museum. Katya won't come with me.”

Katya looks over at her. “Yes, I will,” she says. “I will, Trix.”

Trixie ignores this. Miss Delectable Zamo will have to earn her trips to the museum. “Reach over and get her something cute out of my drawer, Kat.”

“I don’t need to change,” says Leah. “Just the makeover.”

“This _is_ the makeover,” says Trixie. “We’re hanging out tonight.”

“I’m not allowed,” says Katya, but she hands over a white blouse that Trixie has altered so it’s mostly lace below the bust. She looks at Leah with her hair completely off her face and says, almost to herself, “I don’t recognize you.”

“I know,” says Trixie. “Gorgeous, huh.”

Male footsteps make the stairs creak. Katya attends to a new section of braid as if studying an algebra equation in very small print. Trixie listens to the second flight of creaking and waits for the doorway to fill with Charlie. On the stairs, he is humming bebop. _Hum job_ , thinks Trixie. It sounds half musical and half obscene, a phrase she has heard before, probably in this house.

When Charlie appears he is all door. His hair falls out his shoulders in a way that makes women tuck it behind the Kool over his left ear.

“Hi, Charlie.” Katya’s voice is slow and musical, as if everything in the room is underwater. Trixie watches her closely. Stolen earrings gleam from under Katya’s hair, and on her wrist is Paul's watch, which seems to Trixie like a terrible risk: walking down the street with plunder flashing like traffic lights.

“Miss Temptation.” Charlie bows his head formally.

“Hi, Mr. Mattel,” says Leah, and to Trixie, “It’s beautiful, but I can’t wear it. You can see everything-”

“I wear this to _school_ ,” Trixie says.

“It’s Charlie,” says Charlie, “and somebody in this room should definitely wear that.”

“Can I try it?” says Katya.

“Not you,” says Charlie, studying Leah. “Her.”

Leah says, “I decline.”

Trixie watches Katya’s fingernail slip into her mouth. She marvels that Leah thinks everything is about the shirt, when in fact Katya is waiting to be tuned again by her best friend's father’s attention, and Charlie is flirting with the school giraffe.

“What, do I not get a vote?” says Charlie. He uncocks the Kool from behind his ear. Katya rises with a pink plastic lighter, and he grips her entire hand while he inhales.

Then he kisses her knuckles.

Trixie, fierce, says, “Charlie, would you get _out_? You got the clarinet vote, that’s it. Put it on, Leah.”

“Where’s the bathroom?”

“Leah, will you just turn around and put on the top before I undo this whole damn makeover? I swear I’ll take out every braid.”

“Why are you doing this?” says Leah softly, fingering the lace. “I can’t change here.”

“But you can,” says Charlie. “I won’t look.” He turns sideways in the doorway, extends one arm to the opposite doorpost, and tucks his head down behind it, smoking.

“He won't cheat,” says Trixie, because she knows this one thing about her father. He likes to win what he gets.

Leah looks at Charlie with his head under his wing. Then she scoots around on the dressing-table stool. Her spine is as long and pale as a yardstick, bisected by a white bra strap. When I’m done with her, thinks Trixie, she’ll be wearing black. Leah turns back in the mostly lace blouse, and Trixie says through her fingers, “You’re beautiful. I bet you had no idea.”

Charlie turns, too. He presses his fingertips to his lips, then opens his hands wide. The gesture is packed with irony, but Trixie wonders if Leah can tell. Leah is the tottering lamb who cannot see the altar. “Daughter, you have said it. She had no idea. It is the source of her beauty.”

Katya doesn’t wait for Leah to blush. “I can’t go out tonight,” she says, as if she has spent the past five minutes underwater. “You should wait for me.”

Trixie looks at the clarinet case. It is a pebbly black box that hunkers by her dressing table. With sugary innocence she says. “We won’t go anywhere exciting. Maybe we’ll hang out here.” She gets a hooded look from Katya.

“Fine,” says Katya. “If they play again, I’m going down to listen.”

“In that case,” says Charlie, “why don’t we have a brief lesson.”

 _Don’t m_ , thinks Trixie.

“Have fun at the _museum_.” Katya picks up her backpack and the loaner clarinet.

“Always carry your ax,” says Charlie approvingly. He puts a hand on Katya’s shoulder.

Trixie looks away. She senses that Leah, demoted now to merely the girl in the lace blouse, seems altered by what she saw in Charlie’s eyes. _The source of her beauty_. She sits straighter. She feels, Trixie decides, shinier.

Trixie can be a mirror, too. A better mirror. She will finish the French braids and teach Leah the Pearl Drops toothpaste move, and they’ll steal some of Charlie's pot. Maybe Leah will sleep over. She will teach her how to dance.

“You should take off Paul’s watch,” says Trixie.

“You should quit using Estelle’s photos in art,” says Katya coolly.

“Who’s Estelle?” says Leah.

Charlie makes an arch in the doorway with his arm. Katya ducks under it without looking back.

  


They are in fact, having an actual lesson.

From outside Charlie’s closed door Trixie hears clarinet scales, clumsy, with mistakes and do-overs. She walks into the bathroom and listens through the narrowly open door. For a moment there’s silence from the bedroom, then fluid, mournful scales pour from the clarinet- that would be Charlie, of course. She’s never really thought about clarinet until now, the way its private, throaty unhappiness underlies even its lighter notes. She thought oboe had sole claim to musical grief.

Silence again, then Katya’s laughter.

She listens through ten more sets of scales- Katya’s- punctuated by murmuring and bursts of laughter. Lessons should not be this much fun. An ache opens in her stomach and spreads to her chest. From the third floor, Leah calls, “Trixie?” and Trixie makes her own inelegant music, creaking across the floorboards and back up the stairs.

 

Katya, carrying her backpack and the loaner clarinet, walks to the subway at Union Square and takes it uptown, like crazy far. Trixie watches her from between the cars, swaying. Leah, still wearing the lace blouse, hangs back. Katya stays on until Ninety-Sixth, where all the other white people disappear off the face of the planet. “God, let her walk downtown,” says Trixie, but she follows half a block behind as Katya heads north on Lex. They pass Spanish people and tough-looking kids just out of school. Katya walks without apparent fear.

“Are we safe?” says Leah. In fact people are staring at her, a girl two inches shy of six feet, hair braided tight but flaming in color, lace revealing her navel.

“We’re cool,” says Trixie. Toughness is her métier, but she does not carry a knife like everyone knows kids do up here, so she is feeling a little freaked. She turns her mother’s ring around on her finger; now the diamond and the rubies won’t flash.

“She’ll see us,” says Leah. “She’ll kill me.” She considers. “She’ll try.”

Trixie’s not sure who knocks her out more, this pretty shiny brave Leah, born in her pink room an hour ago, or reckless Katya who strolls toward robbery or rape or whatever awaits chicks who wander past projects in Spanish Harlem. Maybe, having held a gun, Katya lost her fears. Trixie certainly feels more capable.

“Let’s get this over with.” Trixie grabs Leah’s wrist, bone thin, and they walk up behind Katya at the light on Ninety-Eighth.

“Katya,” says Trixie, and when Katya whirls around, “Don’t get mad. You owe me.”

“I knew you were there,” says Katya, “and I owe you shit. You, you’re dead.”

“I quit being dead,” says Leah, though she looks at Trixie when she says it.

“You’re in my neighborhood, you might already be dead.” They are standing outside a hair salon with its door open and that Ricky Ricardo music playing. In the window are pictures of women with different hairstyles, fancy ones, updos, stuff none of the Pleasant Grove moms would be caught dead with.

“You’re not Puerto Rican” says Trixie. “What are you doing here?”

“ _Zamo_. Russian,” says Leah automatically.

“Russian,” repeats Katya. “It’s cheap to live here. I ride the bus. Is that a problem?

Trixie scrutinizes her. “You don’t ride the bus.”

“Say it. I ride the bus,” says Katya.

“But you don’t,” says Trixie. Katya has short blonde hair and fair skin. She _knew_ Katya was Russian, but she hadn’t truly known what it meant until now.

“That’s your big fat mistake. You look at me, but you don’t see. _I ride the bus_.”

She wheels around and walks toward Ninety-Ninth. Trixie and Leah follow. They pass a storefront that fixes flat tires and another that seems to sell dolls covered with dust and has young men lounging outside, watching them intently. “Okay, if it matters that much, you ride the bus.”

“It matters that much.”

“You ride the bus, and you’re going to give me that fucking clarinet.”

“I’m going to give you shit.”

“Clarinet,” says Trixie, “or I never talk to you again.”

Katya hesitates, then thrusts the clarinet hard into Trixie’s arms. Suddenly it’s the last thing Trixie wants to touch.

“Your father is- fucked up.”

“Did you kiss him?”

Leah looks back and forth between them, riveted. A meat truck roars by, almost consuming Katya’s answer.

“No,” says Katya, but she says _no_ with two syllables, and Trixie hears _yes_ and lifts her hand. Katya doesn't flinch. “He touched my mouth.”

“He touched your fucking _mouth_? With what?” Trixie’s hand is gripped at the wrist by Leah. She wonders if she would have slapped Katya.

“He put two fingers on my lips. He said pretend it was the mouthpiece. He just said blow. It was part of the lesson.”

“Did you kiss them?” Trixie lets Leah push her hand down.

“His fingers?”

“Yeah, were you kissing his goddamn fingers?”

“It was like this, if you really have to know,” says Katya, and on the corner of Ninety-Ninth Street and Lexington Avenue, surrounded by passersby and storekeepers in doorways and a boy with a transistor radio to his ear and two young men in suits and young mother with a baby carriage, she takes Trixie’s first two fingers. Trixie lets her do it, lets Katya put her fingertips with their bitten nails on Katya’s soft lower lip. She feels the damp flesh and the hardness of teeth as Katya edges her fingertips fractionally deeper and thinks _This is the softness inside Katya Zamo I have always known,_ and, a second later, _My father was here_.

Katya closes her lips and blows.

Trixie yanks her fingers back and wipes them on her top.

“I didn’t know what to do. He’s Charlie Mattel. He was giving me a lesson. Is that a kiss?”

“No,” says Trixie. “It’s disgusting. He’s my father and you were in his bedroom and that makes you-”

“Go ahead,” says Katya.

Trixie looks up the block, where a dumpster is parked outside a fenced-in empty lot. “Wait here,” she says. Because of Charlie her mother has split and her best friend has almost defected, and there have been other losses she cannot find words for. She walks to the dumpster and hurls the clarinet case inside. It lands on a raucous heap of bottles.

She walks back to Katya and Leah and says, “Tell Charlie you gave it back to me.”

“It’s under control,” says Katya.

“That’s criminal,” says Leah. “I could find it a home.” She starts forward, but Trixie grabs her backpack strap. They watch in silence as a teenage boy in burnt-orange pants moves in on at dumpster.

“So you were going to follow me all the way, right?” Katya says. “You almost call me a slut because of you're sick father who can’t give a formal lesson to save his life. I suppose now you want to meet my grandmother.”

“She _exists_?”

“You seriously want to know- forget it.” Katya starts walking uptown so abruptly they trot to catch up.

“Why wouldn’t she exist?” says Leah, and Trixie thinks, We have to give this girl a job more interesting than being perpetually in the dark.

Katya laughs. “Yeah, she exists.” Her voice takes on a caramel edge- that’s the only way Trixie can think of it. “The question is, do _you_ exist? She thinks I study with a good Catholic girl named Silda.”

“You lied about _me_?”

“You think a decent Russian Grandmother would let me hang out at your house?”  
Trixie opens her mouth and closes it. They turn east on 101st Street. People gather on the stoops of brownstones in a proprietary way that Trixie never sees in Greenwich Village, and it seems to her that every one of those people ignores her, stares at Leah, the beautiful giraffe, and nods or says something in Spanish.

They stop in front of a gray building zigzagged with fire escape and cross hatched with window gates. “So, my grandmother,” says Katya. “If you look at her funny, your most private business is going to be all over the school.”

Trixie feels half like a butterfly has landed on her wrist and half like a knife is angled to her neck. She notices that Leah, not the type to glance at anyone’s grandmother funny, is doing a decent job of staying under Katya’s radar. A pack of kid’s sautners toward them, checking Leah out while they talk and smoke. She wonders if Katya will walk them back to the subway after dark or if they will have to get there on attitude alone, keys spliced out between their knuckles.

“She’s a sweet lady. I cook her breakfast and dinner, and I try to keep the scholarship you didn’t know I had. And I don’t get paid twenty dollars a week to live with her, and it sucks that you didn’t believe me.”

Trixie lights a cigarette. Leah makes a small, shifting gesture, and Trixie passes her one. The pack of kids breaks, swarms around them, regroups.

“It sucks that I have to think of you sucking on Charlie’s fingers,” says Trixie.

“Blowing on,” says Katya. “I quit clarinet, obviously. I quit Charlie, okay? He’s like… hypnotic. He’s a creep, if you don’t mind me saying.”

Trixie doesn’t mind.

“So listen, when I introduce you to my grandmother, you say _Dobriy den’ gaspazha Zamo,_ like ‘Good afternoon Mrs. Zamo.’ Do it.” Katya sounds beautiful speaking Russian. She says it real slow so Trixie and Leah can learn.

Leah bares a long throat, exhales a stream of smoke, and mimics the sounds in near perfect Russian. She’s done being an acolyte, thinks Trixie. She had the acolyte tenure of a moth.

When Trixie tries the Russian, her tongue feels thick. She wants to touch Katya’s hair. “I didn’t know you could cook,” she says.

Katya shakes her head. “Museum. Jesus,” she says, and pushes open the front door. To Trixie’s surprise, Leah steps into the lobby first. The floor tiles are laid in a jazzy pattern, and music pulses through one of the apartment doors. Trixie hears trumpets playing faster and brighter than they do in her father’s music, She hears quick percussion like the congas in the park, and some fantastic clicking sound that makes her want to move, but she doesn’t know how. The pattern on the floor tiles is practically jumping, and Leah thrusts her hand in the air as she follows Katya up the stairs, circling her hips on each step. Climbing behind Leah, Trixie looks up and sees Katya on the first landing do a little two-step, hips held straight, not sweating like when Trixie puts on the Doors. Trixie hopes that if she does everything right- if she repeats the Russian, if she believes the stuff about the bus- Katya Petrovna Zamo will teach her how to dance.

  


The grandmother is tethered to earth by the steel wheels of her chair and the absence of one leg. Her remaining leg, and her upper arms, are buttery loaves of flesh. Yet Trixie looks at the high cheekbones and flawless hairline, the elegant ledges of brows and lips carved as graceful as Katya’s, and takes her in as shapely. Someone has pinned up the grandmother's thick silver hair with curved combs, and gold hoops hang from her ears. Trixie repeats to herself: _She has no idea. It’s the source of her beauty_.

Clearly not blind, the grandmother looks the girls over, wary and pleased. On the wall behind her is a thrilling picture of a heart wrapped in thorns and encircled by fire. It’s clearly connected to Christ, whose portrait hangs nearby and who would resemble Charlie if he clipped his beard. Katya and her grandmother speak to each other in Russian. Her one foot has lost its curves to swelling, but she wears a neat white ankle sock, folded down at the top; and it occurs to Trixie that the person who washed the sock, and dried it, and put it on, was Katya.

Trixie takes a deep breath and says, “ _Dobriy- dobriy-_ ” and prays to Saint Cath for the rest. She dips into a little curtsy of desperation as Leah steps forward and says the words.

The grandmother nods once, as deeply as her chins allow. “Beautiful,” she says in four appreciative syllables. She might mean Leah or the perfect Russian or that Katya has brought her these lovely girls from the outside world. Trixie looks at the flames bursting from the heart of Jesus and thinks: For this I sacrifice the clarinet.

  
  


The day after the sacrifice, Katya finally agrees to go to the museum with Trixie. Leah is also invited.

The first impression Trixie gets of the suicide girl is white shins and a pair of Candie’s platform sandals dangling over the limestone ledge, about twenty-five feet in the air above her.

The second-story ledge encircles the grand staircase at the Metropolitan Museum, and the owner of the shins seems to float up there, suspended over the foot of the stairs. Petite and trembling, the suicide girl plants her hands at her sides as if she intends to propel herself down.

It’s six p.m. A chamber orchestra plays at the lobby crowd, and Trixie, on the ground floor beneath the ledge with Katya and Leah, can’t stop staring. Around the girl, the gray fluted columns and balusters and the bench like ledge she’s sitting on seem as frigid as architecture carved from ice. She must be freezing, thinks Trixie, who is bundled in Estelle’s cape. She grabs Katya’s arm, ignoring Leah’s glance. Katya gives her a sad little smile and lets her keep the arm. It feels good in Trixie’s hand, resilient and lean.

Many people start talking at once. More hands fly to mouths. People stare up at the girl as if she were some bright bird flown in from the zoo.

The girl looks over at the people massing below her and on the second floor with a darting, startled gaze. To get to the high ledge, which rims three sides of the stairwell, she must have climbed over a granite railing upstairs, and because she has tucked herself in a corner against a massive pillar, the guards can’t sneak up from behind. It’s cold in November for her sandals, and her clothes are out of season, too; she wears a summery, finch-green dress.

A guard upstairs begins admonishing the girl. More people drift to the base of the staircase to see. _Don’t push_ , snaps Leah.

Trixie’s long hair lies with static electricity and seeks the coats of people squeezing past. Katya stands to the side, letting the crown part around her and looking up at the girl in green as if, Trixie thinks, she were a puzzle Katya had to solve. Lilies opiate the air. Men and women in dark, gorgeous clothes spill toward the stairs from the lobby; the air is electrified in that area, and pulses of murmuring grow urgent. Trixie, still gripping Katya’s arm, glances at Leah; she guesses it’s not the pushing Leah minds but the spectacle being made of the girl, who looks ready to cannonball from the second floor.

Near Trixie and Katya, a woman with taut, shiny skin and eager eyes says to her companion, “what’s she going to do from up there? Break a fingernail?”

Katya tips her head and says, “is that your medical risk assessment?”

The woman colors and looks away.

Sometimes, late at night in the pink room, Katya and Trixie talk about the future. Katya wants to be a doctor. Doctor Zamo. Four years of medical school could be nothing, she would tell Trixie, who would agree.

Trixie would indulge, too. “Mr. Weiss says even artists can go to college. There’s RISD or Cooper Union,” Trixie would say. Sometimes Trixie thought about not bringing a gun to school, and she thought about the life she could have with a high ponytail and charcoal marks stained on her hands.

The conversation usually gets cut short, when Katya goes back to the Yellow Pages, looking for someone to sell them bullets. They had the second gun, bought from a guy in Katya’s neighborhood who took the combined $75 and low cut tops as payment enough. Now they just needed ammo, enough to get through their lists.

In the Met lobby the chamber ensemble play something sweet and fresh that makes Trixie think of rainwater streaming between cobblestones.

People have gathered up and down the stairs as if they were bleachers. “You can’t sit there,” another guard calls up to the girl, as if this were merely an infraction of the rules. Abruptly, Katya shoulders her way toward him. He is young and, Trixie is sure of it, shaking. She watches them confer. She wants Katya’s arm back, she is going to need it, if the suicide girl falls.

“She must be crazy to want to die like this,” Leah whispers.

“She doesn’t want to die,” says Trixie.

“Honey,” Katya calls up, and her voice is a clear chime. The chatter quiets. “Sweetie. It’s never as bad as you think. What can I do? You want to tell me why you’re up there?”  
The girl smacks one foot hard against the wall, and her sandal sails off. It hits a man on the shoulder when it falls, and a flinch ripples through the crowd. “No.” She has a raspy, little-girl voice that should be selling Q-tips, Trixie thinks. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Several more guards appear at the foot of the stairs and begin gesturing for the crowd to move. Some people are almost directly beneath the girl, and the guards form a phalanx and usher them back toward the gift shop. Someone shouts, “Is there a doctor?” and from far back in the lobby someone else calls, “Cardiac surgeon, coming through.”

That could be Katya one day, thinks Trixie. Saving a girl’s life in different ways.

“You don’t have to talk about it, sweetie.” Katya stands in her black turtleneck and jeans, looking and sounding like exactly what she wants to be, a medical student who rotates through a slum gynecology clinic and has to gain the trust of teenage girls.

“But I think you should think about what you’re doing,” says Katya.

  


“Dell,” the boy says, “I didn’t touch her. Please come down.”

He’s up on the second floor, too, leaning into another pillar and gazing across the top of the staircase at Dell as if this were just one of her stunts. Everyone gets very quiet.

The girl leans over as if the stairwell were a deep pool and she expects to roll forward off the ledge and splash. Which, thinks Trixie, in a sense she might. She imagines, crazily, that the girl might spread her wings and take flight over the lobby, green belly flashing above the crowd. “You love her,” the girl says, and her voice echoes over the staircase.

“I didn’t touch her,” the boy calls. Which is not the same, Trixie thinks, as _I don’t love her_. “For Chrissake, Dell.”

“What a prize,” says Leah to Trixie.

“Get a ladder,” calls a guard, which is ridiculous; the girl is maybe twenty-five feet in the air.

Katya cups her hands to her mouth and say loudly, “Honey?” and even the guards look at her. Even the boy looks at her, and Dell sits back up and looks at her. Katya lowers her hands and stands in the center of the floor at the bottom of the grand staircase. “If you fall, can I tell you? You won’t die, honey,” Katya says. “You may break some bones, maybe paralyze yourself. But no way you’re gonna die.”

“Oh my God,” Leah murmurs through her fingers, “she could call on her _face_.”

“I might die if I stand,” says the girl. She kicks off the other sandal, causing another mass flinch.

Then she does stand, gingerly, bare toes curled around the edge of the granite.

Two guards climb over the balusters from either side and move stealthily toward her, but she whirls to each side, causing everyone to gasp. “Don’t come any closer,” she says, and the guards hesitate.

“Honey, come down the long way and talk about it,” says Katya. “No guy is worth this kind of damage.”

The girl shakes her head.

“She’s doing great,” Trixie says quietly to Leah. “She surprises me all the time.” And it is true; Saint Russian Katya of the Spanish Harlem with a dream to be a doctor and a need to save someone before she kills. Katya has this way about her, the way her voice carries. She could convince anyone to do anything, probably.

Dell shakes her head until her whole upper body begins to sway as she stands on the ledge.

Trixie hears the squall of sirens rise to a pitch outside, then cease. A man appears at Katya’s side. “I’m a cardiac surgeon,” he says. “Who needs me?” he looks around. Then he sees where everyone else is looking, looks back at Katya, and says nothing.

“Dell!” says the boy, and stops. _Don’t stop_ , thinks Trixie.

“That’s it?” says the girl. “Just _Dell_? That’s all you have to say?”

From the second floor, silence. “Tell her you love her, asshole,” someone says loudly.

Leah whispers, “Someone needs to give that boy a script.”

Two policeman rush form to front door through a channel that opens in the crowd as the girl in the green dress either slips or loses her nerve for the dive and lets herself fall sideways; falling about six feet in front of where Katya stands. Trixie hears her land both hard and soft, with a percussive thud.

Katya looks up at Trixie, and they exchange a look. They read each other’s minds, for a moment. Trixie knows Katya is imagining Dell’s body as Leah Rodriguez’s, face down on the cool white tile of the art room. Trixie is thinking about her own dead body. Katya takes Trixie’s hand. The girl screams in pain, not at all dead.

“We’ll shoot each other right after,” Katya whispers as the crowd listens to Dell’s screams in their own silence. “We’ll do it on Monday, we need to do it Monday.”

Sometimes there is a future where Trixie and Katya are artists and doctors and they shoot Dennis in the heart instead, and sometimes there is a future where they shoot each other in the chest, and it is always hard to tell which they deserve more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was very clearly in a bad place when i was writing this fic, and it shows but i want to finish it. i’ve been working on a few other projects as well! 
> 
> you can find me on tumblr: fauxtrixie.tumblr.com
> 
> feedback is appreciated


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